martes, 3 de julio de 2018

Stories From Experts About the Impact of Digital Life

While many technology experts and scholars have concerns about the
social, political and economic fallout from the spread of digital
activities, they also tend to report that their own experience of
digital life has been positive

Technology experts and scholars have never been at a loss for concerns about the current and future impact of the internet.

Over
the years of canvassings by Pew Research Center and Marca Poliítica
Imagining the Internet Center, many experts have been anxious about the
way people’s online activities can undermine truth, foment distrust, jeopardize individuals’ well-being when it comes to physical and emotional health, enable trolls to weaken democracy and community, compromise human agency as algorithms become embedded in more activities, kill privacy, make institutions less secure, open up larger social divisions as digital divides widen, and wipe out untold numbers of decent-paying jobs.

An early-2018 expert canvassing of technology experts, scholars and health specialists on the future of digital life and well-being
contained references to some of those concerns. The experts who
participated in that research project were also asked to share anecdotes
about their own personal experiences with digital life. This report
shares those observations.

Specifically, the participants in the nonscientific canvassing were asked:

Please
share a brief personal anecdote about how digital life has changed your
daily life, your family’s life or your friends’ lives in regard to
well-being – some brief observation about life for self, family or
friends. Tell us how this observation or anecdote captures how
hyperconnected life changes people’s well-being compared to the way life
was before digital connectivity existed.

Many of these experts wrote about a number of powerful ways digital life makes things better. Some themes:

Themes about the personal impacts of digital life

THE POSITIVES OF DIGITAL LIFE Glorious connectedness Many argued that
the internet has provided one of the greatest boons to individuals: the
ability to reach out and connect directly with friends, family,
colleagues, knowledge, education, entertainment and more anywhere
globally at any time in a nearly free and frictionless manner.

Invent, reinvent, innovate Digital tools enable people to invent or
reinvent their lives and careers. They can also innovate through wide
networking with people and information that allows them to develop
businesses, find the perfect job, and meet soulmates, colleagues, new
friends and fellow interest-sharers.

Life-saving advice and
assistance People can tap into and share medical, safety and health
resources and support at a moment's notice, which is crucial for
personal health and a game-changer for people engaged in child and elder
care.

Efficient transactions These experts also hailed the
way the internet revolutionizes life logistics and experiences. They
cited benefits including accessing online education, researching
purchases, finding the best options for anything, making quick-hit
social connections, planning trips, or coordinating activities ­­­­–
which allow people to be more mobile, savvy and globally enriched.
THE NEGATIVES OF DIGITAL LIFE Connectedness overload Low-friction
instant access to nearly everything, anytime, anywhere is causing
stress, anxiety, sleeplessness and loss of patience. Some experts noted
that they witness people missing out on or diminishing important
face-to-face social interactions and experiences. Some also noted that
work demands and entertainment lures tug away at users 24/7/365 and that
there is a loss of attention to "real life."

Trust tensions
The business model of internet platforms is mostly built on an attention
economy that rewards addictive products that heighten users' emotions
and perpetuate polarization. In addition, there are concerns among
experts about issues of security, surveillance and privacy.

Personal identity issues Self-promotion, narcissism, click bait,
trolling, propaganda and pressures to conform have become dominant in
social networks, causing some individuals to experience the loss of
self-confidence and self-esteem. This encourages them to lose faith in
others and adopt a negative world view.

Focus failures Digital
life fosters shallow engagement with information as people glide
through multiple information streams daily, taking little time for
reflection. People have a diminishing capacity to concentrate well
enough to stay on task and do long-term, deep-dive thinking.

The
remainder of this report draws from elaboration of these ideas by
respondents who shared anecdotes and observations. It is broken into
three chapters: 1) anecdotes and comments about the positives of digital
life; 2) anecdotes and comments about potentially harmful aspects of
that life; and 3) responses in which people’s statements or anecdotes
were fairly evenly split with both pros and cons of digital life. Some
responses are lightly edited for style.

The positives of digital life

The
greatest share of participants in this canvassing said their own
experience and their observed experience among friends is that digital
life improves many of the dimensions of their work, play and home lives.
They cited broad changes for the better as the internet revolutionized
everything, from the most pressing intellectual and emotional
experiences to some of the most prosaic and everyday aspects of
existence.

Louis Rossetto, self-proclaimed “troublemaker” and
founder and former editor-in-chief of Wired magazine, summed it all up
this way: “Digital technology is so broad today as to encompass almost
everything. No product is made today, no person moves today, nothing is
collected, analyzed or communicated without some ‘digital technology’
being an integral part of it. That, in itself, speaks to the
overwhelming ‘value’ of digital technology. It is so useful that in
short order it has become an integral part of all of our lives. That
doesn’t happen because it makes our lives miserable.”

There is almost no area in which digital technology has not impacted me and my family’s life.Larry Irving

Larry
Irving, co-founder of The Mobile Alliance for Global Good, wrote,
“There is almost no area in which digital technology has not impacted me
and my family’s life. I work more from home and have more flexibility
and a global client base because of digital technology. I monitor my
health and keep my physician informed using data technology. My wife has
gone back to a graduate school program and is much more connected to
school because of technology. My entertainment and reading options have
exploded exponentially because of new technologies. Use of home
speakers, Internet of Things, AI [artificial intelligence] and other
emerging technologies is just impacting my life and likely will become
more central. I used to write out first drafts of memos longhand.
Increasingly I use a new free beta AI-based transcription service Temi
to dictate my first draft and then edit that draft. Even when it’s
awful, that first draft is better than staring at that blank piece of
paper trying to think of something to say. I have numerous meetings with
people I don’t know or only met once or twice previously. Recently I
had a meeting with someone I didn’t know well. An app I use Accompany
pulled up an email exchange between the two of us a decade ago about an
issue we both care about. Accompany also provided me a very recent
article where the person I was meeting with discussed the same issue and
current concerns. Having that knowledge was incredible useful for our
recent meeting and simply could not/would not have been possible without
the use of digital technology.”

Mike Liebhold, senior
researcher and distinguished fellow at the Institute for the Future,
wrote, “Almost every member of my family regularly uses the internet to
inform or improve aspects of their well-being: diet, fitness, health,
social interaction with family and friends in person and online,
education, entertainment, employment, commerce, finance and civic
engagement.”

William Schrader, the founding CEO of PSINet,
wrote, “Every single day: I have private communications with business
associates in Europe, Asia, Latin America and in North America, and I
receive emails or social media notices from my family members and their
extended friends, and I receive the latest news and alerts from 20
different real news publications (such as the New York Times, Wall
Street Journal, Washington Post and the Economist). All of this comes
with little effort. And, after doing my local security, I can check
every public investment I have made anywhere on earth and I can check my
bank accounts and make transactions I deem of import, and I can search
for any one or multiple piece of information that I need instantly, with
or without Wi-Fi. Yes, I have what I wanted, everything at my
fingertips. That means information, knowledge, history, ability to
transact. I try to never do this when others are with me, since I love
living in the moment. Since I am alone a lot, I can find the time. But I
do not condemn or even slightly criticize people for taking a call,
checking a text, reading, etc. What we built is what we wanted. It’s
just that few people are happier. But, I am OK.”

Paul Saffo, a
leading Silicon-Valley-based technological forecaster and consulting
professor in the School of Engineering at Stanford University, said, “I
have had an email address on my business card since 1982, and carry
enough electronics on my person to get nervous in lightning storms.
Digital connectivity has become like oxygen, utterly essential to my
research. The net effect of these innovations has been to tie me more
closely to other individuals and extend my interpersonal connections
well beyond the pre-internet links of in-person interactions and
telecommunications. I have friends – close friends who I have known for
well over a decade and with whom I communicate nearly every day. We have
never met in-person. In fact, we have never spoken over the phone. At
the end of the day, the two of the three highest human desires are the
desire to be useful, and the desire to share stories. We have been doing
both since our distant ancestors sat around a savanna camp fire sharing
their days and their dreams. Now, thanks to digital media, the circle
around the campfire has grown to encompass (if we wish) all of
humanity.”

Garland McCoy, president of the Technology Education
Institute, said, “I can be a real-time engaged parent, husband, partner,
problem solver, counselor, comforter, etc., while traveling anywhere in
the world, and – if I am comfortable with a little inconvenience – I
can usually manage this real-time interaction for free! Something that
was never possible before. No more ‘Death of a Salesman.’”

Kyle
Rose, principal architect at Akamai Technologies and active Internet
Engineering Task Force (IETF) participant, wrote, “There are simply too
many things to list here. I’ll just hit on three. I can more easily keep
in regular contact with friends in distant places. Those with whom I
would have lost most contact (because, really, there’s no way I’m going
to write letters or spend hours on the phone) I can now maintain a
relationship with, sometimes of a fairly deep and interactive nature,
via social media. This enables us to pick right up when we do finally
see each other in person. Technology eases the difficulties of
day-to-day life. Because of the internet, I have access to virtually all
of recorded music at all times. I can get up-to-date maps and traffic
data to avoid incidents. I can order food, groceries or a taxi, obtain
up-to-date information about my flight status, and navigate foreign
cities via public transit all from my phone with a few taps of my
finger. Finally and relatedly, how the hell did I ever learn anything
before the internet? The card catalog? Virtually all of human knowledge
is at my fingertips at all times. It is rare that I ask a question of
fact that someone hasn’t yet answered, and now many of those answers are
available to anyone with access to a search engine. The impact of all
of these is profoundly positive. And this is only a taste of what the
internet, and technological advances in general, promise.”

Fred
Davis, a futurist/consultant based in North America, wrote, “Messaging
apps allow me to connect with people who have given me support, provided
a chance to talk about life’s challenges, seek advice and many other
things. Access to people is simplified. Chat apps (unlike Facebook)
provide a one-on-one connection with another person, which can be more
personal, human and healing than posting on social networks. I have been
using a Fitbit for a number of years. I have had a heart attack and
triple bypass and am pre-diabetic. Getting regular exercise is
important, and my Fitbit helps me set and attain fitness goals much more
easily than before. The ability to monitor and track my sleep helps me
take actions to get better sleep, which definitely increases well-being.
By connecting to my Fitbit scale I can also track my weight and tie it
to my exercise goals. My Fitbit can connect to a Dexcom blood
sugar-testing device that can test blood sugar every five minutes, which
is extremely helpful in managing my pre-diabetes.”

These one-liners from anonymous respondents hit on a number of different positive themes: “I can get answers to questions about almost anything just by asking my telephone.”“I
can save money on everything, including clothing and shoes, airfares,
hotels and eat at better restaurants and drink better wine.”“Navigation via car has dramatically improved, with accurate up-to-date traffic information and destination wayfinding.”“Digital life is being able to speak and see someone – regardless of where you are – on a phone you carry on your person.”“Most
people I have dated and approximately all of my friends knew me on the
internet first; before such digital connectivity I would have just been
lonely.”“Sharing photos of new generations instantly with loved ones
on the other side of the world and using video and chat to send/receive
money; to joke, to tease, to mourn.”“My son has grown up in a world
in which he will never be lost; he will never be without a person to
talk to; he will never be stopped from searching for an answer to a
query.”“I work remotely for a company halfway around the world, and so does my partner. No need to be at a main office.”“The
diffusion of webinars allows me to participate in many events organized
in different countries without having to travel to them.”“Digital technology allows me to have better knowledge that empowers me to better support my own health when I face challenges.”“My job didn’t exist 15 years ago. I am a digital content manager.”“It means that we can participate in important moments that time and distance barred us from in the past.”“I feel more supported in good times and bad and laugh more than before I was connected online.”

Here is a roundup of the many ways these experts described the benefits they get and the benefits they observe. Family enrichment and enhancement

Pamela
Rutledge, director of the Media Psychology Research Center, said, “My
90-year-old father was on Facebook for the sole purpose of connecting
with kids and grandkids who were scattered across the country. Reading
and commenting on their posts gave him the ability to participate in the
process of their lives. Knowing what the family members were doing
increased his sense of involvement and the overall intimacy he
experienced with them all. This familiarity also jump-started any family
gathering, keeping people who were geographically disparate from
feeling like relative strangers and allowing relationships to be more
immediately meaningful. Texting in all forms serves the same purpose.
Closeness in relationships is achieved by the frequency of contact. The
human brain reacts to virtual contact as if it were real, releasing the
same neurotransmitters of positive emotion and reward as if people were
face to face. Texting allows for the multiple touchpoints, the sharing
of life’s process and the reassurance of connection. These experiences
replicate the behaviors that developmental psychologist Mary Ainsworth
described in her ground-breaking work on attachment theory and how
people form a secure attachment style, essential to emotional
well-being.”

The simplest anecdote is about keeping a family messaging chat open with my wife and children.Stowe Boyd

Stowe
Boyd, managing director at Work Futures, said, “The simplest anecdote
is about keeping a family messaging chat open with my wife and children.
My kids – both in their 20s – live in Brooklyn, which is close to where
we live, but over an hour away. However, we all participate in the
chat, often several times in a day. We share pictures, links, stories,
plans. It is simply much lower friction than how I managed to remain in
contact – or didn’t, really – with my parents when I was in my 20s. Then
it was an occasional phone call, visits when possible, but it was
pretty tenuous. And I had what most of my contacts considered an
unusually close and caring relationship with my folks. I wouldn’t say my
family today is hyperconnected, but we certainly remain very connected,
where scarcely a day passes without some interaction between all of us
despite the physical distance involved. And this has allowed an extra
richness to my life, and I guess theirs, a counter to the possible
distance that could otherwise grow in our relations because of the hour
of travel that separates us.”

David Weinberger, a senior
researcher at Harvard University’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet
& Society, said, “The most obvious [difference of digital life] for
many of us, I’m sure, is the lowering of the barrier to communication: I
am in closer touch with my family – grown kids, siblings, in-laws, the
whole group – because we can communicate with everything from texts to
video calls. We support one another better and know our daily lives
better than we could before.”

Sonia Jorge, executive director of
the Alliance for Affordable Internet and head of digital inclusion
programs at the Web Foundation, said, “Regardless of where I am, my kids
can reach me to talk, text me a message to ask questions, help sort out
a plan, to tell me about their day, their worries, I can help them with
homework or even music practice over video! And, as all mothers, I have
often ‘saved’ many situations! Once I got a message from a school in
the middle of an important business meeting and managed to sort the
situation without any major issue, and all from a different continent!
The ability to stay connected as needed is so important for me and it
allows me to be closer, to be there! I cannot imagine [life] otherwise
and this allows me to do what I do in ways that would have been very
hard before digital connectivity.”

Steve Stroh, technology
journalist, said, “Two observations. The first is that one of the
regrets of my life is that I didn’t work hard enough to stay in touch
with all of my family and friends as I moved away from my hometown and
got involved in my career. Thus, many of my family and friends that were
once dear to me are now estranged – entirely my fault. In my daughter’s
generation (born in the 1990s), with social media like Facebook, etc.,
my daughter’s generation and beyond, they will never get entirely out of
touch with family and friends (unless they really want to). They’ll
know about significant events in their friends’ and family’s lives as
things happen, and can always reach out because there’s a consistent
point of contact – the social media messaging, ‘stable’ phone numbers
such as mobile, email, etc. The second is that my wife and I maintain a
near-daily ‘running conversation’ with my daughter who’s moved away via
three-way ‘text’ messaging. We often share photos (of the family pets,
as it turns out) and let each other know about important or unimportant –
perhaps funny – things that are going on in our lives. So the three of
us are never really out of touch, which is a wonderful, wonderful thing.
I wish I could do this with MY father (who is, alas, very
technophobic).”

Maureen Cooney, head of privacy at Sprint,
commented, “My mother, who is in her 80s, lives on her own and is a
technology leader in our family. Her adoption of cellphone use for
calls, texting, email, FaceTime, and photo-sharing, daily use of an iPad
and computer to play games and to communicate, participation in social
media via Facebook, managing her finances, and even device control in
her home via internet connected technology, as well as for entertainment
through an Amazon Echo, [which] keeps her connected to us and the wider
world as she ages, raising her feelings of confidence, safety, activity
and independence. It lets family and friends easily connect with her in
many ways in real time, which otherwise would not be the case.”

Richard
Sambrook, professor of journalism at Cardiff University in the United
Kingdom, wrote, “Very simply, I can talk to and see my daughter on the
other side of the world at low or zero cost via video/smartphone
technology in a way that was unthinkable a decade or more ago. It helps
hold families together.”

Perry Hewitt, vice president of
marketing and digital strategy at ITHAKA, said, “We live in an aging
society; in the developed world, the population is getting older, people
are living longer, and fertility rates are falling. Here in the U.S.,
where families can be geographically dispersed and family-leave policies
minimal, caring for older relatives is difficult. Our family has
benefitted from the many technology advances in elder care from cameras
to robots to medication reminders to video calling. There is so much
available to track critical metrics and improve quality of life – for
the elderly and their tapped-out caregivers. I believe we’re still in
the infancy of technologies that can improve medical compliance and
personal safety, and combat a scourge many older Americans face:
loneliness.”

Mary Chayko, a professor at the Rutgers
University’s School of Communication and Information, wrote, “My family
and I now stay in contact via an unending series of group texts. While
we would have remained connected via letters or phone calls in a
pre-digital time, this allows the simpler, more convenient and more
frequent sharing of moments both incidental and more meaningful, and
keeps us consistently in one another’s minds and hearts.”

Alex
Halavais, director of the M.A. in social technologies at Arizona State
University, said, “We have two children in elementary school. It starts
at the same time each day and ends at the same time. The children are
generally out of touch with the family during this period. This would
not have been unusual when I was in elementary school or when my parents
were in elementary school, but the other institutions in our lives have
changed this. We have shared family calendars that show who needs to be
where and when, but these change with some consistency. While my
partner and I both have busy careers, they never fall within clearly
defined work hours, and mobile technologies mean that our everyday
social and business lives are weaved together rather than blocked in
clear periods. Time has changed, except for the kids’ grade school. It
remains anchored in one position: the 20th century.”

Eelco
Herder, an assistant professor of computer science whose focus is on
personalization and privacy at Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen in the
Netherlands, wrote, “My husband and I live relatively far away (about
two to five hours) from our families and our friends live in several
countries. Facebook makes it easier to stay in touch with them, to
inform them about important events, to show pictures of our daily lives,
and – in return – to be informed about things that matter to them. For
me, my circle of online friends has evolved from mainly ‘online
contacts’ in the mid-2000s to people whom I know in daily life. As a
result, if we meet friends after a year or so without contact, we do not
need to give an overview of last year, but just continue the
conversation and play a board game. It is also easier now to stay in
touch with a larger number of people than in earlier days. Apps like
WhatsApp allow us to have daily contact with our families, simply by
exchanging short messages or sending quick pictures. This interaction
does not replace phone calls and visits, but complements them.”

Nathaniel
Borenstein, chief scientist at Mimecast, said, “In the 1980s and early
90s, people asked me why I cared so much about advancing the capacities
of email. My usual reply: ‘Some day I will have grandchildren, and I
want to get pictures of them right away, by email.’ This dream came true
when I received an email that contained a sonogram image of my twin
granddaughters when they were each no bigger than a few cells. I had
expected those first pictures to be considerably cuter. Even though I
was an evangelist for the future of communication technology, that
technology exceeded my wildest imaginings.”

Greg Shannon, chief
scientist for the CERT Division at Carnegie Mellon University’s Software
Engineering Institute, commented, “When I call my dad, who is hard of
hearing, the real-time network-enabled transcription service kicks in so
that he can understand what I’m saying by reading the words on his
screen. This dramatically enhances the quality of our conversation and
allows us to be more connected. I’m sure it does wonders for his general
health at 90. Our three sons all work in/around software. Their minds
are filled with notions of programming frameworks, database schemes and
abstract models of what data and interactions mean. It’s [a] world that
their grandparents can’t comprehend, and even their aunts and uncles are
confused about what they do. Many of their childhood friends are far
removed from these conceptualizations of work and value. I am not sure
how it affects their well-being per se, but the notion of a shared sense
of what work means seems weakened. Living and working in multiple
places (Ohio, Pennsylvania, New Mexico) is possible since we can
digitally maintain social and business connections remotely and
asynchronously. Without such digitally enabled efficiencies it would be
very challenging to run such a rich life.”

Srinivasan Ramani, a
retired research scientist and professor, said, “It was in 1993. My
daughter left school in Bombay and moved to college in the U.S.
Telecommunication in India was quite bad in those days. The number of
telephones, both landline and cellular, was about 3 million. (Compare
with the billion or so cellphones we have in the same country now!) I
knew it would be difficult for my daughter to call us back soon after
arrival at the college, and so had asked her to get access to internet
on campus and contact us through email and chat. She did that within
hours of arrival. My wife had, to that point, carefully stayed away from
the dial-up terminal I had on my study table at home for years. Now,
she suddenly demanded to be introduced to the system. She demonstrated
that given the right motivation, people can learn to use a dial-up
terminal for email and internet chat in two days at the most! Our
daughter was, for the next four years, our daughter on the Net!”

Claudia
L’Amoreaux, digital consultant, wrote, “I started using
videoconferencing early. First I used a black-and-white video phone that
sent a still image every 5 seconds or so. Friends and I got our hands
on one and did some fun experiments with artist techies at the
Electronic Cafe in Los Angeles. Later I used Cornell’s CU-SeeMe
videoconferencing. A real turning point for me was using the high-end
PictureTel videoconferencing system in the early ‘90s. When the
PictureTel staff dialed up and connected me to a person in New York City
(I was in Monterey, California), as I said hello, tears came
involuntarily to my eyes; the intimacy was so unexpected, I was
overwhelmed with this encounter with a stranger. Fast forward to five
years ago. My 85-year-old mother had a recurrence of cancer. We lived
many miles apart. On one of my visits, we went to the phone store and I
helped her pick out her first iPhone. It was so awesome to watch her
learn to text with her friends. I could FaceTime her from my home while I
got my life in order so I could return to take care of her. That phone
was a literal lifeline during her last months – a source of joy, a tool
for coordinating her care, and a reassurance for me that I could
actually see daily how she was doing. I think of all the technology in
our lives, videoconferencing technology contributes in a profound way to
my well-being, bringing me closer to dear family and friends who live
at a distance, or even just across the bay like my daughter does. I love
it when we both have time to just hang out together via FaceTime when
we can’t be there in person.”

Kirsten Brodbeck-Kenney, a
director, said, “Thanks to social media and video chatting, my parents
have been able to be very involved in my child’s life in spite of living
on the other side of the country. She is only two and a half, but she
knows their faces and voices and feels connected to them, even though
she’s only met them a handful of times.” Work creator, enabler and enhancer

I
spend a great deal of my day online, and being hyperconnected makes it
possible to find all the things I need to have a decent quality of
life.Dewayne Hendricks

Dewayne Hendricks, CEO of Tetherless
Access, said, “Living a digital life has made it possible to be
self-sustaining financially. I spend a great deal of my day online, and
being hyperconnected makes it possible to find all the things I need to
have a decent quality of life. The type of life I’m leading now would
not have been possible 30 years ago. I take comfort in the fact that
I’ve had a hand in shaping a part of this thriving digital Web.”

Michael
Rogers, a futurist based in North America, said, “I now live half the
year in the Sicilian farm country where, thanks to wireless internet
access, I can do most of my work. Ten years ago that would have been
quite impossible. One of the things I most like about Sicily (besides
the obvious attractions) is that while there is plenty of Facebook and
email and Twitter, the ‘digital lifestyle’ has not colored private and
public life so much as it has in my other home, New York City. Sicily
remains a far more face-to-face culture. Why that is the case and how
long it will continue is a longer story, but it is ironic that I’m using
the new digital tools to avoid the side effects of those same tools.”

Larry
Roberts, Internet Hall of Fame member, original ARPANET leader, now
CEO/CFO/CTO of FSA Technologies, Inc., said, “As I do have 100 Mbps of
home internet access, I can mostly work at home. However, file sizes
that I need to receive today of 60 MB need Google Drive to deliver, as
email capacity is in the dark ages. And the sizes grow every year. Email
must adapt as these demands grow and TCP [Transmission Control
Protocol] transfer speed also needs to increase as it is stuck in the
1990s at 20-30 Mbps. As shopping has also gone digital, package delivery
requiring signature can be easily included when working at home,
whereas it would become a major problem otherwise. In fact, work can be
seamlessly intermixed with running a household. Eliminating commuting
and fixed work hours allows working a 12-hour day (which I need). Thus,
with increased internet capacity at home, more work can be done with far
less stress for those workers not tied to hardware in the office.”

James
Blodgett, an advisory board member with the Lifeboat Foundation, wrote,
“Important work is shared. When several string theorists published
several papers predicting black hole production at particle colliders, I
became involved with the collider controversy. The original safety
considerations had glaring holes. … I made contacts with safety experts
and scientists who were also concerned. I started a Global Risk
Reduction special interest group in Mensa, I became an advisory board
member of the Lifeboat Foundation (one of thousands), and I participated
in writing petitions and contacting people. … The main thing we
accomplished was to get CERN, the organization sponsoring the
then-upcoming Large Hadron Collider, to do a second safety study.”

Marshall
Kirk McKusick, computer scientist, said, “Today I have worked on a
problem in my open-source community (FreeBSD) in which over the past 24
hours has involved colleagues in 10 time zones, including Ukraine,
Germany, United Kingdom, Massachusetts, Iowa, California, Hawaii, Japan,
Australia and India through a combination of email, messaging and IRC
[Internet Relay Chat]. This would have been impossible before the
internet.”

Jordan LaBouff, associate professor of psychology at
the University of Maine, commented, “There are so many ways, from
allowing me to stay connected to my family and other relationships while
I travel for work and research, to being able to translate or navigate
on the fly in difficult cross-cultural situations. The one that springs
to mind is actually my wife’s work experience. Two years ago, due in
part to the challenges of living with multiple chronic health
conditions, my wife left her successful job as a cell technologist at a
local hospital to pursue digital journalism. It has allowed her to work
from home and write for a large public audience about research
surrounding bipolar disorder. This digital environment provides her
employment, and her writing supports thousands of people every week who
read her research (that she accesses digitally) and writing and who get
social support and well-being tips from it. It’s a remarkable way the
digital world has improved our physical one.”

Tom Wolzien,
chairman at The Video Call Center LLC, said, “My family’s creation of
The Video Call Center to produce broadcast-quality television from the 4
billion global smartphones (and related patents and other intellectual
property to make it reliable and cost effective) has enabled a
flattening of traditional live video access, enabling programs based on
zero-cost live remotes from about anywhere on the planet without field
origination, transport, or control room costs. This means that any media
organization can put about anyone on the air from anywhere, restricted
only by the depth of the producer’s contact list.”

Jane
Elizabeth, director of the accountability journalism program at the
American Press Institute, wrote, “Digital technology has allowed my
small non-profit organization to work efficiently and effectively from
wherever we are in the world. For non-profits and even small for-profit
organizations, you just can’t overstate the positive benefits of this
type of mobility. There are absolute cost savings in overhead, travel,
hourly wages. And there are qualitative benefits in employee work-life
balance, productivity and emotional health.”

Jeremiah Foster, an
open-source technologist at the GENIVI Alliance, said, “I lived and
worked in Sweden for about 15 years. Recently I moved back to the United
States to be with family since I’m originally from the U.S. I’m able to
keep my employment, including my salary, my title and my day-to-day
work while living thousands of miles away from the company I work for.”

Eugene
Daniel, a young professional based in the United States, said, “Digital
technology impacts every aspect of my daily life. As a member of the
media, my job depends on technology (telecommunications, social media,
internet). As a person who lives apart from family and loved ones, I
depend on digital communication to stay in touch – including frequently
connecting on FaceTime with my girlfriend. The uses are endless.”

Devin
Fidler, a futurist and consultant based in the U.S., commented, “Sites
like Upwork have allowed Rethinkery Labs to routinely pull together
‘flash teams’ of colleagues, support and expert advisers in a way that
accomplishes many tasks more efficiently than would have been humanly
possible before coordination platforms.”

Frank Feather, a
business futurist and strategist with a focus on digital transformation,
commented, “Technology allowed me to quit commuting – which is asinine
in this era – to quit my career job, and to become a full-time
consultant, thus allowing me to help far more organizations on a
freelance-anywhere basis. This has been most fulfilling. Similarly, my
children have built worldwide networks of friends and fellow students.
We have two adopted daughters, and the internet has allowed one of them
to find and connect with her birth family in China. None of this would
be possible without the internet. The internet unifies people and
combines ideas very easily.”

Yoram Kalman, an associate
professor at the Open University of Israel, wrote, “Digital technology
freed me from having to spend all of my work hours in the office. I have
been telecommuting and working from home at least part of the week
since the late ‘90s. That would not have been possible without the
advent of digital communication. It allowed me to better integrate work,
family commitments, leisure, health challenges of self, of children and
of elderly parents, social commitments, etc. Consequently, my work is
more productive. Furthermore, the ability to work across geographical
and national borders opened new opportunities that made my work more
exciting and fulfilling. Throughout this time, I had to learn and
relearn how to use communication technologies in ways that empower me,
and how to minimize the harm they cause. It is an ongoing learning
challenge.”

Charlie Firestone, executive director of the Aspen
Institute’s communications and society program, said, “I run an office
of seven people. I was able to move from Washington, D.C., to California
with little detriment, mostly due to video-conferencing. In our case it
is Skype for Business that puts each employee a touch of a button away,
and the video changes the interaction from simply voice calls or email.
I see video calls, a la FaceTime or Skype to be a common activity of
the future in business.”

Allen G. Taylor, an author and SQL
[Structured Query Language] teacher with Pioneer Academy, said, “Digital
technology has given me opportunities that were not possible before the
digital revolution began. A vast array of career opportunities opened
up in a variety of fields. I became a digital design engineer and moved
from there into a variety of related professions. The convenience of
digital devices such as personal computers and smartphones has enhanced
life greatly, both for me and for every member of my family.”

Adam
Montville, a vice president at the Center for Internet Security, said,
“I have the privilege of working from home each and every day. While
there are some aspects of office life I miss, the truth is that
technology has made this possible. For our family, this has been
immeasurably valuable. I can work more productively at different times
of day, all while maintaining healthy boundaries for work/life balance
(which really isn’t about hard boundaries as much as it is about
unobtrusively blending the two). Before such technology existed, I had
to commute. I had to be tied down to a specific schedule each and every
day. I couldn’t connect to colleagues from a mountainside or a sailboat.
It just wasn’t possible.”

Ann Adams, a technical writer based
in North America, said, “It gave me a profession; one that did not exist
when I was growing up.”

Vincent Alcazar, director at Vincent
Alcazar LLC, wrote, “The growing mobility of labor cannot be
underestimated, and the primary enabler is the gig economy with the
internet as its engine. The gig economy only grows from here, as does
its entwinement within people’s lives.” Health and wellness aid

Avery
Holton, an associate professor of communication at The University of
Utah, commented, “As someone who has twice experienced the impact of
cancer, once at the beginning of digital and social media and once in
2016, I feel more empowered by the ability to be transparent and
accepted. Yes, we all still enjoy sharing those moments in our lives
that give off the best appearance, but the stigma of sharing experiences
of disease or pain or loss has lessened. More and more, we are
encouraged by the actions or the postings of others to share our tougher
experiences and to, if we so wish, build a community around those
experiences. The first time I went through cancer, I felt lost and
disconnected and without voice. This time, though it admittedly took
some coaxing from friends and other supporters, I shared my experience
and my recovery. That really helped me through the process and into a
quicker, more lasting mental, emotional and physical recovery.”

My
online network and digital tools made it easy to share the event, his
progress, my stress and feelings, for others to empathize and share
resources and advice.Susan Price

Susan Price, lead experience
strategist at the United Services Automobile Association (USAA),
commented, “My husband had a stroke last year. My online network and
digital tools made it easy to share the event, his progress, my stress
and feelings, for others to empathize and share resources and advice. I
found myself carefully segregating my communications by channel,
moderating the degree of honesty according to the size and makeup of the
group. I report to the largest group in Facebook ‘sanitized’ updates of
mostly hopeful progress reports and vignettes that show me or my
husband in a flattering or inspirational light. I avoid upsetting others
with starkly honest or too-revealing stories of my own or my husband’s
pain, frustration or lack of coping. My husband is aware of my
propensity to share, and has asked directly when we’re discussing a
fraught situation, ‘This isn’t going on Facebook, is it? Good!’ But he
suggested my posting and sharing some achievements. Because of its
ubiquity and reach, Facebook helped me identify select others in my
network – many of whom I hadn’t spoken with in 10 to 20 years – who had
directly relevant experience with caregiving of stroke survivors and
adjusting when a partner suffers a severe health crisis. With those
found veterans, I moved the discussion to more private channels such as
Facebook Messenger, email or phone to share more honestly my negative
feelings, fears and pain, and received directly helpful specific advice,
support and resources. I’ve also used caregiver forums to connect with
quickly available communities of peers in situations much closer to my
own.”

Gina Neff, an associate professor and senior research
fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute, said, “Digital technology has
been a godsend for care-givers, allowing people to coordinate their
efforts to help during cancer treatment, when a newborn arrives, or
during a health crisis. Apps and websites cannot replace the communities
that have always connected and supported us, but they can help diverse
and dispersed groups coordinate care in unprecedented ways.”

Bradford
Hesse, chief of health communication and informatics research at the
National Cancer Institute at the National Institutes of Health (NIH),
said, “I now stay in closer contact with my healthcare provider than I
ever have before. If I have a question, I can ask it through secure
messaging. If I want to evaluate my own recent blood panels for areas of
concern or progress, I can do that online through a secure portal.
Robocalls to my house from my provider as well as text messages to my
phone ensure that I do not miss a recommended cancer screening. I watch
my diet more rigorously with the help of a diet app on my smartphone
equipped with camera to retrieve caloric/nutritional information, and I
monitor my exercise goals through the use of my Apple Watch wearable. If
I have a complaint, it is usually because the ecosystem of medicine is
still not connected enough. There are laggards who resist sharing my
electronic health record data with specialists as needed. There is
20th-century thinking that prevents these digital technologies from
being fully integrated into the medical system in ways that will be
cost-efficient, interoperable, empowering and truly usable.”

Thomas
Lenzo, a respondent who shared no additional identifying details,
commented, “Digital technology has facilitated my management of various
aspects of my healthcare. I am able to schedule appointments and order
prescription refills online, at any time of day. I can get detailed text
or video information about health issues from trusted sources. I have
access via portals to my health records. I also tell family and friends
how they can use digital technology to impact their health.”

Ed
Black, president and CEO of the Computer & Communications Industry
Association, said, “The ability to monitor the medical records,
procedures, medicines of a loved one remotely provides opportunity for
quality oversight and rapid response, in contrast to being tied to
hospital visits and uncertainty.”

Gary L. Kreps, distinguished
professor and director of the Center for Health and Risk Communication
at George Mason University, wrote, “My family and I use wearable fitness
trackers that tally our daily exercise behaviors (steps). This has
influenced both our awareness of our physical activity and motivation to
exercise regularly. We strive to accomplish our 10,000 daily steps! We
also compare our exercise levels and encourage each other to engage in
physical activity. We now seek opportunities to exercise together to
achieve our activity goals. This has improved our overall physical
activity, fitness and health.”

Kevin J. Payne, founder of
Chronic Cow LLC, said, “Since I research the effects of chronic illness
and live with multiple sclerosis, I have a particular interest in using
these technologies to monitor and evaluate my condition, keep up on the
latest research, and connect with others – both professionals and others
living with chronic conditions. My life has been radically affected by
these burgeoning technologies on all these fronts. It allows me to
collect my own data, blend it with other datasets and generate and test
real-time predictive algorithms. I have a far better understanding of my
condition, especially as it is baselined against relevant populations. I
not only get access to cutting edge pre-print research, but I’ve also
been able to widen my professional network by communicating with the
researchers. And my involvement with patient communities has enriched my
life in many ways.”

David Myers, a professor of psychology at
Hope College, wrote, “As a person with hearing loss and an advocate for a
hearing-assistive technology that has great promise
(www.hearingloop.org), the internet has networked me with kindred spirit
advocates nationwide (also via 19,898 emails I have sent and 18,516
received with the words ‘hearing’ and ‘loop’). Together, our
internet-facilitated ‘hearing loop’ advocacy has led to thousands of
newly equipped facilities, from home TV rooms to worship places to
auditoriums to airports (and New York City subway booths and new taxis).
And more progress is on the horizon. Supported by digital technology,
we are making a better world for people with hearing loss.”

Bob
Frankston, a technologist based in North America, said, “I once had a
rash and my GP [doctor in general practice] wanted to look it at.
Fortunately we had a friend in common who was able to forward a simple
digital picture I took and quickly resolved the issue. It’s a reminder
that digital health doesn’t have to be complex and expensive. Sending a
picture is simple and inexpensive yet can make a big difference – a huge
benefit vs. cost. We need to appreciate the value of the mundane rather
than focusing on the flashy stories.”

Doug Breitbart,
co-founder and co-director of The Values Foundation, said, “In my life I
have experienced significant adverse changes and circumstance, living
situation and health. Virtual connectivity via the internet has enabled
me to establish networks of connections, collaborative communities and
new friendships and relationships with people around the world.”

Leah
Robin, a health scientist based in North America, said, “My family has a
genetic form of anemia that is very rare. Because of digital technology
we’ve been able to make contact with researchers, take advantage of
on-going research, and provide and receive support from other patients
from around the world. The impact has been, at times, lifesaving for my
family members.”

Christopher Bull, a university librarian, said,
“I had an itchy rash on my hands. Found articles on the internet which
suggested using witch hazel. No rash, no itch.” Community lifeline

Ethan
Zuckerman, director of the Center for Civic Media at MIT, wrote, “I
went through a divorce recently and wrote about my experiences online.
While there are few folks in my immediate community who are going
through divorce, I found several friends in other cities in my extended
circles who had excellent support and advice. One of the most supportive
individuals was an acquaintance from college who was not a close
friend, but who stepped up on Facebook and was a wonderful support to me
from halfway around the country.”

Together, we grow
intelligence, connect up one another’s work and support positive social
change just by doing our work, following one another and sharing what’s
meaningful more widely.Anne Collier

Anne Collier, consultant and
executive at The Net Safety Collaborative, said, “I ‘talk’ with people
all over the world on a daily basis on Twitter – seeing, learning from,
supporting and spreading what’s meaningful to them in their work and
lives. It’s a tremendous source of inspiration for me. Together, we grow
intelligence, connect up one another’s work and support positive social
change just by doing our work, following one another and sharing what’s
meaningful more widely.”

Kathryn Campbell, a digital experience
design consultant, said, “I have a young friend who lives in another
state in a rural area. Over time, I have realized from their social
media posts that he/she is emerging as gender non-conforming (probably
transsexual). In the past, this is a journey that I would probably not
have known about, especially since his/her immediate family is very
conservative and have not accepted this facet of the young person’s
identity. I am so grateful to have been included in this revelation so I
can offer my unconditional love and support. And I am even more
grateful that a person who in the past would have felt isolated,
unnatural, and broken now knows that they are in fact part of a global
community. He/she can find and utilize peer support groups as well as
myriad medical, psychological and spiritual resources that would not
have been available to someone in a small town in the past. I believe
this will probably save lives. I definitely hope that it will help
increase our ability as a society to accept others who don’t conform to
our preconceived notions of what is normal.”

Ana Cristina
Amoroso das Neves, director of the department for the information
society at Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, said, “The smartphone
has become a part of my family life. The current organisation we have
and the data we can share more than modified the way we interact. There
is no waste of time and therefore we all gain efficiency in our daily
life. The dawn of Internet of Things is already embedded. … If there is
an electricity glitch, we cannot even think how will we survive due to
the new paradigm we have in our lives. Hyperconnection is part of my
family and friends’ well-being. It is nothing that can be compared with
the life my parents had. I wonder how I could have survived in that
society, living before total digital connectivity existed, even when it
had just started and was not spread yet.”

Deborah Lupton, a
professor at University of Canberra’s News & Media Research Centre,
said, “I live in a vast continent (Australia) where academics are
scattered many kilometres from each other, and it is a very long,
expensive and exhausting plane ride from my colleagues in the Northern
Hemisphere. However, I have extensive networks with my colleagues on
Twitter and Facebook. I enjoy taking time out to chat with them, sharing
professional and also some personal information regularly. It makes me
feel less isolated and more easily able to keep in contact with my
academic network. Nothing beats face-to-face encounters, but social
media and emails, as well as the occasional use of Skype, is a far
better way to maintain these contacts than letter writing or faxing,
which is how we did things before digital media.”

Andrew
Czernek, a former vice president of technology at a personal computer
company, wrote, “Email and websites were the first place that we were
able to see family and people with the same interests share information
rapidly. Twenty years ago I set up two websites – one for pilots and one
for family members – to share photos, family tree[s] and technical
information. Both have been resounding successes in getting people
together. For family, it has allowed easy distribution of ancestor’s
photos and extension of a family tree from several hundred people to
more than 3,000. About every five years I have to take our family tree
back to the calligrapher to add ancestors that we didn’t know about –
including, recently, a soldier who was with Gen. George Washington at
Valley Forge. Now we’re starting to see services like voice-controlled
appliances in the home and the extension of cellphone service throughout
the world. Forty years ago I taught in a small Congo town that was
isolated, with no phone or TV service. Today Kasongo can be reached by
cellphone and the regional center has television and internet access
thanks to wireless technologies.”

Nancy Heltman, visitor
services director for Virginia State Parks, said, “I have met and
developed relationships with people outside any sphere of reference I
never would have had thanks to my digital life. This started when I
worked on the 2008 Obama campaign, includes people I met through a group
where we shared our love for household pets and goes through today
where I have a relationship with customers that I never would have met
personally. While I do not believe that my online relationships replace
ones that involve personal face-to-face connections, they are important
and have broadened my horizons in many ways, adding a richness to my
life. In fact my more-traditional face-to-face relationships have also
benefited from more communication due to digital communications. When
forced to only have relationships with people you can meet in person,
you tend to live in a more-narrow world, with people more like you.
Digital communications broadens your horizons, or it can if you want it
to.” Social media: The horizon expander

Michael R. Nelson,
public policy expert with Cloudflare, said, “I’m an avid user of social
media, which I use to track developments in internet policy around the
world. Almost every day, one of the people I follow on Twitter, Facebook
and LinkedIn shares a report, law review article, economic analysis, or
news article on something I need to know about and would not have
discovered by just reading the U.S. newspapers and media sites I track
regularly. Equally importantly, my Facebook and LinkedIn friends
introduce me to experts in the field in countries around the world –
without my having to spend time flying overseas to attend conferences.
In 2017, I was able to be a fun participant in the Global Conference in
Cyber Space in New Delhi without missing Thanksgiving with my family.
Likewise, I was able to be a remote participant at the UN’s Internet
Governance Forum in Geneva without leaving my house (as long as I was
willing to tune into the webcast at 4 a.m.).”

Alexander B.
Howard, deputy director of the Sunlight Foundation, wrote, “I’ve been
using computers for over three decades now, since logging on through a
BBS [bulletin board system] in 1993. My professional life as a writer,
analyst, consultant and now deputy director of the Sunlight Foundation
is almost entirely enabled by digital technology, from the journalism I
created to the advocacy, activism, policy and communications work I do
today. Social media has opened many doors for me, professionally and
personally, in ways I did not anticipate a decade ago. The smartphones I
began using last decade dramatically improved that work, enabling me to
be informed, report and collaborate in extraordinarily flexible ways
across time and space – and to easily travel through many foreign cities
and nations.”

Dan Rickershauser, senior account manager at
StumbleUpon, said, “I was born in 1987. When I first signed up for
Facebook, I was a senior in high school and you needed a dot-edu [.edu]
email address to gain access. We were all welcomed onto the platform as
we got new email addresses once accepted into our college of choice. It
was a place to show friends and acquaintances how much fun we were
having in college. And then over time it became so much more. My parents
had Facebook accounts. Work relationships became Facebook friends. It
was a tough to navigate as its role in my life shifted. I scaled back
how much I shared there. I changed what I projected out to masses. My
sister-in-law, by time she hit college age, knew Facebook as a place
where her grandmother kept track of everyone’s comings and goings. All
of this happened in the span of seven years. For her, Snapchat replaced
Facebook as the place to showcase to acquaintances how much fun she was
having in college. I now use Facebook to see which of my friends have
gotten married or had children. I’m still thankful it’s around, but the
role it’s played in my life has changed. For people a generation
younger, it’s been the place I remembered it as. It will be interesting
to see what’s in store for these platforms, but already I can now see
people my age pulling away from social networks like Facebook, often
times for their own well-being. As the role platforms like Facebook play
in our lives shifts, so too does our need for them. It will be
interesting to see if they survive these shifts.”

Michael
Roberts, an internet pioneer and Internet Hall of Fame member, commented
“Despite its well-known problems, I find that Facebook is important to
me in a number of ways. 1) Keeping up with professional friends around
the globe now that I am retired. For an old fart (81), it is a source of
daily intellectual stimulation and a feeling of keeping my hand in the
game. 2) A window into many marvelous places and activities. I am a
railfan and there are restored steam engines, abandoned trackage, lonely
and empty depots, etc., to fill any amount of time I have available.
Name your hobby or sport, and there are folks out there to share their
discoveries with you. 3) The original ‘family and friends’ angle. My
siblings and I are all over the U.S. Facebook lets us pretend we are
close (Worldwide webcams add a lot as well). There are lots of other
examples – politics, medicine, personal safety, education.”

Jerry
Michalski, founder of the Relationship Economy eXpedition, said, “I now
have peripheral vision into the lives of family, friends and
acquaintances a few degrees from me – all voluntarily. When I see them, I
don’t need to ask ‘what’s up,’ but can say ‘I’m glad your daughter got
through her operation,’ or whatever is appropriate for the state of
their lives I can observe. Those weak ties are priceless, and lead to
insights. In the early days of Twitter, I left a meeting and tweeted
something like, ‘Just left a mtg about the cash health care economy. Had
no idea it existed or was big.’ At the time, I had set up for all my
tweets to forward to Facebook, and the next day I got a fascinating
eight-paragraph note on Facebook from an acquaintance who had taken his
family off regular health insurance years ago, and was very happy with
the outcomes. On the other hand, I am among the Satanic Device Addicts
who check email on their phones first thing in the morning (it’s on the
night table, right?) and tap and prod them all day long, in search of
those little dopamine hits.”

… All of us now have the
ability to find ‘our people’ – those who share our interests and
passions and concerns – in ways that we couldn’t when our connective
avenues were limited by time and geography.Scott McLeod

Scott
McLeod, a professor at the University of Colorado Denver, wrote, “My
decade-plus of blogging and other social media usage has connected me
with hundreds of thousands of educators and education thought leaders in
global dialogue spaces and communities of practice in ways that would
be impossible without the internet. My visibility and reach are now
astronomical compared to what they might be in an analog era. My example
is but a microcosm of the possibilities that we all now have available
to us. The gay teenager in rural America; the handmade Japanese sword
aficionado; the stay-at-home mom struggling with a rare disease; the
LARPer [live-action roleplaying gamer] looking to connect with others;
all of us now have the ability to find ‘our people’ – those who share
our interests and passions and concerns – in ways that we couldn’t when
our connective avenues were limited by time and geography.”

Jason
Hong, professor at the Human Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie
Mellon University, wrote, “WeChat is not well known in the U.S., but is
perhaps the most popular app in China. It’s primarily a messaging app,
like Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp, but also serves as a social network
and message board. What’s really amazing is how it’s really helped my
family (from China) connect with others here in the U.S. My
father-in-law found people to go fishing with. My mother-in-law found a
monthly foodies group to go to. My wife found some of her old high
school classmates, plus a group of people that buy foods in bulk at
discount and split the costs. As for me, well, I’m the boring one, I
just use it to send text messages and emoji to my wife. For my family,
WeChat works well because it lowers the transaction costs of finding
individuals with similar interests and backgrounds. My parents-in-law
don’t speak much English, so WeChat acts as a major filter for people
who do speak Chinese. WeChat also lets you organize message boards by
geography, making it easy to find groups that are geographically nearby.
It’s pretty amazing, since these weren’t really problems that we knew
we had, and the WeChat groups just filled those needs quite nicely.
Furthermore, it was a good tool that let us first find people virtually
and then transition to real-world relationships.”

Richard
Bennett, a creator of the Wifi MAC protocol and modern Ethernet,
commented, “Facebook was useful for spreading the word to my extended
family about the status of two relatives who died of pancreatic cancer
recently. In one case, a sister-in-law in another country used me as a
go-between to reach my wife, and in another I used it to contact a
former stepbrother, a sister and a half brother. As modern families
become more complex, communication tools have had to adapt.”

Lisa
Nielsen, director of digital learning at the New York City Department
of Education, said, “I am the administrator of several Facebook groups
around areas of personal interest such as hobbies, sports, career
(education). I started a Facebook group for teachers at the New York
City Department of Education who love teaching with technology. In the
past all these people existed in the 1,800 schools across the city, but
there was no way for these people to find one another. The group now has
close to 3,000 members. It is highly active, and strong relationships
are being built. We have a direct line to what is happening in schools.
Teachers feel supported like never before. They are more confident and
better able to serve their students. They have increased job
satisfaction. They share extreme gratitude for the group and its
responsiveness. They are no longer alone but rather supported by a
powerful network of other dedicated teachers.” Knowledge storehouse

Stephen
Downes, a senior research officer at the National Research Council
Canada, commented, “I don’t have a small story, I have a big story. I
have a career that has allowed me to be a force for good, to reach
people around the world, and to share a message of compassion,
communication and development, all solely because of the internet and
digital technologies. I landed my first real job in the computer
industry in 1981, with Texas Instruments’ Geophysical Services in
Calgary. This enabled me to attend university, where I studied
philosophy. I wrote my honors thesis on an Atari and I wrote my masters
on the university network. I started teaching using technology for
Athabasca University in 1987, and started developing websites and
learning management systems for a living in 1995. By participating and
sharing my knowledge and discoveries freely through discussion lists and
online conferences I became a part of the online learning community in
Canada, which led to my current employment as a digital researcher with
the federal government. This has given me the opportunity to develop new
theories of learning and pedagogy, create learning technologies,
develop MOOCs [massive open online courses], and participate in this
survey. Every week there’s a story. Today I responded to an enquiry from
a reader looking for more recent work on automated language
translation, because she had only a reference to my paper from 2001. I
provided her with some resources from my newsletter, and she will add
these to her study. Last week someone literally said to me ‘You changed
my life’ because of the influence of the first MOOC I taught alongside
George Siemens in 2008. The course was about computer networking and
personal empowerment and how people can create their own education. The
week before I was able to carry a message about business intelligence
into a meeting with government officials as a result of the analysis I
did of the public documents posted by the School of Public Service on
their web page. The week before I was in Berlin at a conference testing a
virtualization of my personal learning application, getting experiences
and feedback from a workshop filled with experts from around the world,
none of whom I had met before. The week before I was in Tunisia talking
about the deployment of open educational resources in the Middle East
and Northern Africa to support language learning, economic development,
and cultural growth. The week before… You get the idea. None of this
happens without digital technology. It’s not a nice neat story that fits
a sidebar, but it’s real, and each week there’s real growth, real
development.”

Jeff Jarvis, a professor at City University of New
York’s Graduate School of Journalism, said, “I count as an unfathomable
luxury the ability to look up most any fact, any book, any news article
at no cost and in seconds. I value the friends I have made from a
tremendous diversity of background and worldviews thanks to the
connected Net. I welcome many – though certainly not all – new voices I
can hear now thanks to the Net putting a printing press in anyone’s
hands. And not incidentally, I have transformed my career thanks to the
lessons I continually learn by and about the Net.”

Deborah
Hensler, professor of law at Stanford University, wrote, “On a personal
level, digital technology enables me to work more productively from any
place in the world. It provides access to a vast store of information
and research data. It has enabled me to collaborate with academic
colleagues in many different parts of the world, which has been an
incredibly generative experience. In my personal life, it connects me to
far-flung family and friends. It also connects me to people who share
my political views, which gives me some hope – perhaps foolish – that
working with them I can shift the political discourse.”

Ray
Schroeder, associate vice chancellor for online learning at the
University of Illinois Springfield, wrote, “I have been engaged in
teaching, researching and presenting/publishing in advocating
educational technology in higher education over the past 46 years. As I
think back over those nearly five decades, my impact and reach today is
far greater than I had ever imagined in 1971 or ‘81 or even 2001.
Through the use of social media, I am able to share resources and
perspectives to tens of thousands of others in my field on a daily
basis. The prospect that one person could manage that scope of impact
and reach was inconceivable for anyone who was not a network commentator
on television or a nationally syndicated columnist. Now this
opportunity extends to all who are dedicated to a purpose or cause.”

Larry
MacDonald, CEO of Edison Innovations, wrote, “Sharing enables power to
flow to those who ‘know’ rather than only those who control. People have
a better grasp of news and tools that can make their lives easier.
Knowledge disseminates faster and deeper.” Problem solver and wonder creator

Hal
Varian, chief economist at Google, commented, “I was in Rio trying to
communicate with a taxi driver a few months before the Olympics. The
driver pulled out his phone and clicked on Google Translate. Problem
solved. Turns out that Google had trained all the taxi drivers in Rio
how to use this fantastic tool.”

In terms of the spread of
knowledge, the past two decades have been as revolutionary as when early
man harnessed fire.Kenneth Cukier

Kenneth Cukier, senior editor
at The Economist, wrote, “In researching my new book on AI, I came
across a citation of a relevant document from the 1950s by the East
German secret police, the Stasi. I Googled it and got a digital copy –
which, when you think about it, is amazing. But my German is lousy. So I
uploaded the 35-page report into Google Translate and got an English
version a minute later – which is even more astounding. Just 20 years
ago it was impossible for all but the most prestigious scholar to obtain
something like that, and it might take half a year. I did it on impulse
in four minutes. In terms of the spread of knowledge, the past two
decades have been as revolutionary as when early man harnessed fire.”

Vint
Cerf, Internet Hall of Fame member and vice president and chief
internet evangelist at Google, commented, “I moved my wife from an older
iPhone with AT&T service to a Google Pixel 2 with Google Fi
service. It took 10 minutes and did NOT require physical modification or
even installation of a SIM card. I got confirmation from AT&T
within minutes that the account and phone number had been transferred. I
was astonished.”

Ginger Paque, a lecturer and researcher with
DiploFoundation, wrote, “Digital technology offers amazing opportunities
for inclusion and access not only to overcome challenges of distance,
but offering wider choices, asynchronous collaboration on shared
projects, online meetings, telemedicine, and myriad other advantages. My
particular experience in addition to my clear connections to global
online learning, highlights the possibilities for inclusion in global
policy processes, especially those involving internet governance and
digital policy. The UN Internet Governance Forum, for example, takes
place in situ during less than a week once a year, and even that week of
meetings involves a high percentage of online participants from all
over the world. However, the planning for this event takes place online
all year, with collaboration from a large body of participants from all
over the world. Without internet technology and online applications for
collaborative editing and meetings, this kind of global, geographic, and
multi-stakeholder (I add multi-stakeholder as a factor, because some
stakeholder groups have more access to travel funds.)
Multi-stakeholderism would be seriously hampered and cooperation would
not be possible. In addition to the IGF [Internet Governance Forum], the
ITU [International Telecommunication Union], Internet Society and other
organisations have also developed procedures that allow for year-round
work involving all regions. In addition to fairly normal and common
challenges for travel to meetings, I have had serious family
responsibilities that have not permitted me to travel in the last few
years. While it has not been easy, I have been able to stay involved.”

Bart
Knijnenburg, assistant professor at Clemson University, said, “Seven
years ago, when I got my first iPhone with FaceTime, I was calling my
fiancée (who was living on the other side of the country) on my bike
ride home from work. Out of nowhere a number of hot air balloons
appeared, and with the touch of a button I was able to switch to a video
call. I remember being amazed by the simplicity with which I was able
to share this experience. Nowadays, communicating with people anywhere
in the world has become second nature to me. Sometimes I realize that I
have written several research papers with people whom I have never met
in person!”

Heywood Sloane, partner and co-founder of
HealthStyles.net, said, “The criterion I used for my most recent
purchase of a smartwatch was that it NOT try to be a watch. I have one
already, a gift from my wife that I am very fond of, thank you! I
expected, and got, a multitude of tools to help me stay on track with
stress, sleep, biometrics and much more. What I did not expect, was the
way it tamed the peppering of email, notifications by apps, ringtones
and alarms of people and things clamoring for my immediate attention. It
reduces them all to gentle vibrations. Long ones for calls I wanted to
take, and short ones for everything else. It lets me block interruptions
from apps and emailers. It also let me see others and get more detail
with a tap when I want it. It gives me control and helps me defend my
space to concentrate and focus on what I choose, rather than what
someone else chooses.”

Thomas Viall, president of Rhode Island
Interactive, commented, “Just this past Christmas shopping season is a
great example of how digital technology was beneficial. We could text
our relatives rather than interrupt them with a call. They were able to
share their wish list, we could comparison shop online (at both local
and national stores), find the best value, search for coupons and either
order online or use navigation to find the best route to the store
despite holiday traffic.” Education tool

Olugbenga Adesida,
founder and CEO of Bonako, based in Africa, wrote, “The digital
revolution has changed social relationships and the way we communicate.
In some African countries like Kenya and Zimbabwe, mobile payment
transactions are responsible for over 40% of GDP. Mobile apps are used
to deliver education as well as providing timely information to farmers
to enhance their productivity. Similarly, mobile apps are used to
deliver price and other market information. At our firm – Bonako a
mobile games and app-development company – it is our platform for
continuous education for staff; it is what we use to access training
materials from all over the world. We also use digital tools to plan and
develop our products in a way that would not have been possible only a
few years ago. Developing games and apps requires varied expertise, and
collaboration is key. The new tools for collaborative work allow us to
work together and to provide virtual access to potential
partners/clients to test products no matter where they are in the
world.”

Karl M. van Meter, founding director of the bilingual
scientific quarterly Bulletin of Sociological Methodology, said, “Far
from being a ‘brief personal anecdote,’ what has changed greatly in my
life and work, like that of almost everyone in higher education and
research, is that the internet and associated technologies mean that no
longer only a few top persons have access to the necessary information,
technology and means for scientific production and teaching. It is no
longer only the director (always a male) who gets his secretary (always a
female) to type out his paper and check references before having it
published. Almost all competent teachers and researchers have that
possibility now; moreover they can work together over great distances
and form social structures among themselves, independent of centralized
or local administrative control. A ‘brief personal anecdote’ along these
lines would be when a national director of scientific research here in
France asked to be appointed to an international body associated with
UNESCO. That body replied very respectfully to the director that they
had already found a better candidate from France who had been working
with them via the internet. That other candidate was me.”

Today,
students I help mentor through their own doctoral studies have access
to all of the material I did two decades ago, but with a fraction of the
time and travel commitment.Greg Downey

Greg Downey, a professor
and associate dean at University of Wisconsin, Madison, said, “When I
was a graduate student at a U.S. private research university in the late
1990s, I spent many hours gathering background context for the
beginning of a major historical and social research project, tracking
down physical newspaper indexes, footnote references, printed journal
volumes and microfilm reels from dozens of access-restricted research
libraries. Weeks and months of ‘metadata labor’ on a particular idea
might lead to a viable research project and a source of accessible
primary research materials – or to a dead end and a need to start all
over. I recall being among the first users of some of the online image
databases produced by the federal government to find visual evidence
that I simply wouldn’t have had the ability to access (or even know it
existed) even five years earlier. Similarly, once materials were
acquired and assembled, only rudimentary organization and writing tools
were available for assembling the project into a coherent narrative. I
recall being one of the first individuals at my university to use
Geographic Information Systems software in my historical analysis and in
the production of my final manuscript. All of the temporal and spatial
expectations of earning a Ph.D. in the humanities and interpretive
social sciences were tied to expectations of analog, print and
physically housed resources. Today, students I help mentor through their
own doctoral studies have access to all of the material I did two
decades ago, but with a fraction of the time and travel commitment. This
has raised the expectations for comprehensiveness in literature reviews
and archival searches; it has raised the expectations for presentation
of data and engagement of narrative. It is both easier and harder to do
great work now and get that Ph.D. within the same five-year time period.
But I think the work that is done is of higher quality, and the
scholars that are produced are of greater intellectual prowess and scope
than ever before.”

Adriana Labardini Inzunza, commissioner of
Mexico’s Federal Institute of Telecommunications, said, “There are so
many stories of how IT and internet have made my work more productive
and my access to relevant information far easier – hopefully for others
around me as well. As a commissioner at the Federal Institute of
Telecommunications I made sure that our virtual board meetings and
deliberations were valid; on many occasions I have been able to
deliberate and vote on the cases submitted to the board through a video
conference when in business travels and I also to hold e-meetings with
my staff. My office has home-office on Mondays, saving hours of wasted
time on traffic jams. …

“A more striking story perhaps is that
of Marce, a smart, determined and brave 19-year-old girl from
Xochicalco, an isolated village in the middle of the mountains of
Guerrero, 350 kilometers away from Acapulco. Marce studied elementary
and middle school in a rural local school, but there is no high school
in Xochicalco, so she would have had to travel each day to Arcelia, Gro.
[Guerrero], the seat of that municipality and the closest connected
town in the area, 40 miles away, with a daily cost of public
transportation of around $4, something totally beyond the family’s
budget. Her father is a skilled electrician working in the area for a
Canadian mining company that pays minimum wages to local people ($4 per
day). Her mother grows corn and vegetables and looks after her other two
children. So Marce ended up leaving her hometown and moving to the big
city of Mexico to seek a job as domestic helper, hoping she could enroll
at a public school. Her job kept her busy all day as a babysitter and
so her mom, who I had the fortune to know from a long time ago, asked me
for help to guide Marce so that she actually gets an education.

“Marce
moved to my house, but in searching for an affordable high school
nearby she encountered many obstacles. I devoted a few hours to seek a
public high school online program certified by our Ministry of Education
(SEP) and found it, a very impressive two-year program which begins
with a full-month course on the use of IT, the platform, how to interact
with your assigned tutor, with teachers, how to deliver homework
online, etc. I had never seen a young girl so excited to spend online 4
hours, learn in three days to handle a laptop one of my sons gave her.
She reads her lessons every day plus a few books I am asking her to read
on history, philosophy, etc. She reads 10 pages every morning. It’s
been only three months since she started, and she loves it, she is
learning, and finished at the top of her class this quarter. She feels
empowered, hopeful, her parents feel relieved that she doesn’t have to
travel two hours a day to attend school and pay fares. Yet it will take a
lot of guidance, hard work and long hours before she earns a high
school diploma and more importantly, a good quality education that
enables her to be admitted at UNAM [National Autonomous University of
Mexico] or another public university here in Mexico City. There is no
such a thing in Arcelia, forget Xochicalco, where there is no internet
access and a weak signal for only 2G mobile voice services in spite of
the presence of a multinational firm extracting all the lithium it can
get from Guerrero but not creating much local value to the hard-working
people of Xochicalco. I am committed to help Marce, and she is
determined to graduate and pursue her professional education. She wants
to become a chef. With a good use of time and technology, discipline and
some degree of guidance and support from my sons I may hopefully help
her thrive.”

Jacob Dankasa, a North American researcher, said,
“Technology has connected me to achieve today what I couldn’t imagine in
the past. When I was doing my doctoral dissertation, I was supposed to
travel to Nigeria from the U.S. to conduct interviews with my research
participants. Unfortunately, the Ebola epidemic blew up in Africa and I
was unable to go. Fortunately, software existed that allowed me to
interview the participants and automatically record the sessions as I
interviewed them. The price was reasonable. It saved me money and time
and avoided health hazards. More and better innovations are expected in
this area in the future.” Travel companion and enhancer

Paul
Jones, a professor of information science at the University of North
Carolina, Chapel Hill and internet pioneer, wrote, “I am traveling to
Casablanca Sunday. My tour was booked in China. I’ll stop at Rick’s
Café, which is designed to look like the imagined cafe built on a back
lot in Burbank in the 1940s [for the film ‘Casablanca.’] Friends who are
writers have recommended their friends [for me] to meet while I’m
there. Through social media we are already in touch. One friend wrote a
profile of the Rick’s founder in 2006. She remembers him and has been in
touch. The seamlessness and timeliness of casual connections made
stronger still amazes me. … What’s not to like?”

I travel a
lot and have vastly more flexibility and local knowledge at hand due to
my devices. I see things I would not have seen, travel without having to
plan every stop in advance and find the things that matter to me. I get
better hotels and food, too.Brad Templeton

Brad Templeton,
software architect, civil rights advocate, entrepreneur and internet
pioneer, wrote, “I travel a lot and have vastly more flexibility and
local knowledge at hand due to my devices. I see things I would not have
seen, travel without having to plan every stop in advance and find the
things that matter to me. I get better hotels and food, too.”

Jon
Lebkowsky, CEO of Polycot Associates, said, “A week or so ago we headed
off to a party at a house we’d never visited. We entered the address in
Google Maps, so we had a guide (we call her ‘Lucy’) taking us where we
need to go. It was a circuitous route – without Lucy we likely would
have taken wrong turns – and I was thinking how much we now depend on
that technology, not just to get us where we want to go, but also to
route us around traffic congestion. Soon enough, we’ll be stepping into
autonomous vehicles, vocalizing an address and relaxing for the duration
of the ride. Digital technology for transportation efficiency is
revolutionary.” Safety enabler

Alejandro Pisanty, a
professor at Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico and longtime
leading participant in the activities of the Internet Society, wrote,
“The ability to use digital tools for everything I do – from
professional work, like teaching and research, to the most personal –
finding long-separated relatives after the family dispersed from Europe
to at least three continents in the 1930s-1940s – has been a continued
benefit. Using lightweight online tools in class helps my students in
the National University of Mexico grasp concepts and communicate them to
their families. During the aftermath of the earthquakes in Mexico in
2017 this became particularly valuable for them; it also helped fight
misinformation and take relief efforts to the places that most needed
them. We went from the basics of oscillation and wave physics, through
the propagation of different kinds of seismic waves. To the ways
buildings are damaged and how to identify fatal structural flaws. In
parallel we helped brigades take aid to small towns and to camps in
Mexico City, and some of the most far-flung ones find safe havens from
which to distribute aid.”

Pedro Cartagena, an associate
professor at the University of Puerto Rico, said, “After hurricane María
in Puerto Rico, the internet was the only communications resource in
order to contact my family members, buy solar panels and get other
essentials for survival.”

Apps for ordering car rides via a
smartphone is a net benefit to society – it increases safety for both
the passenger and driver and offers more convenience in ordering a
ride.Tom Barrett

Tom Barrett, president at EnCirca Inc., wrote,
“1) With the use of a smartwatch, I can now easily track daily exercise
activity, which is a great motivator for making it a daily practice. 2)
Apps for ordering car rides via a smartphone is a net benefit to society
– it increases safety for both the passenger and driver and offers more
convenience in ordering a ride.” Multipurpose and memory aid

Bill
Lehr, a research scientist and economist at MIT, wrote, “There is no
question smartphones and always/everywhere access to information has
allowed me to be sloppier in memorizing things and allows me to gain
instant access to facts that I have come to rely on significantly. I
think that is positive, especially since as I get older, I find
memory-aids a big help, but it also encourages laziness.”

Ted
Newcomb, directing manager of AhwatukeeBuzz, wrote, “LOL. I am virtually
helpless without my phone to remind me of appointments and meetings. My
head is free of having to remember numbers, dates and times. It’s very
liberating. I can instantly communicate anywhere in the world, doing
business at the ‘speed of byte.’”

Micah Altman, director of
research and head scientist for the program for information science at
MIT, said, “When I was 10, I received a portable film camera. It had a
capacity of 24 negatives (in black and white). I would send the
negatives in, pay a substantial portion of my allowance to have them
developed – wait for weeks for them to be returned, and finally, then be
able to see how they turned out. (Usually, not so well.) Every few
months, I might put one in a letter to my grandparents. Eight years ago,
when my daughter turned 10, we gave her a portable camera – over the
next few years she shot thousands of still, and videos – learning some
elements of composition, and building shared memories. Last year, when
my son turned 11, we gave him a cellphone. And over the year we’ve all
shared pictures, accomplishments and sympathies daily across a growing
extended family network.”

Shiru Wang, research associate at the
Chinese University of Hong Kong, said, “Online shopping saves me time.
New social media continues my connections with friends in different
countries and regions. Online resources make my research convenient.
Online news keeps me informed all the time. But I am not very digitally
embedded. I keep a distance from Facebook, etc.; I intentionally refuse
to be dominated by social media. Thus, my life is not very much bothered
by the internet. Thus, I appreciate the advantages of the internet and I
am able to escape the potential harm brought by the internet.”

Joe
Raimondo, digital customer-relationship-management leader at Comcast
and a former CEO, said, “Trackers and personal data are an enhancement
to living. Street-level navigation and easy access to crowdsourced
resources is very positive. It’s possible to play large-scale social
games and have enormous amounts of data and telemetry collected and
analyzed to chart group interaction at large scale.” General comments

Ian
O’Byrne, an assistant professor of education at the College of
Charleston, wrote, “As an educator and researcher who studies these
digital places and tools, I’m in front of screens a lot. I experiment
and play in these spaces. I’m also writing and researching the impact of
these screens and their impact on the well-being of others as it
relates to children and adolescents. The problem in this is that one of
the other hats that I wear is as a parent and husband. I am not only
critical of my engagement and use of these digital technologies, but I’m
also cautious/cognizant of their role as a mediator in my relationships
with my children and significant other. These screens and digital tools
play a strong role in our lives and interactions in and out of our
home. In our home we have screens and devices all over the place. We
have a video server that is ready to serve content to any one of these
screens on demand. We have voice-assistive devices listening and waiting
for our commands. I believe it is important as an educator and
researcher to play with and examine how these devices are playing a role
in our lives, so I can bring this work to others. Even with these
opportunities, I’m still struck by times when technology seems too
intrusive. This is plainly evident when I’m sitting with my family and
watching a television show together, and I’m gazing off into my device
reading my RSS feed for the day. Previously I would enjoy watching the
funniest home videos and laughing together. Now, I am distant. The first
thing in the morning when I’m driving my kids in to school and stop at a
red light, previously I would enjoy the time to stop, listen to the
radio, look at the clouds or bumper stickers on cars around me. Now, I
pull out the phone to see if I received a notification in the last 20
minutes. When I call out for the voice-activated device in my home to
play some music or ask a question, my request is quickly echoed by my
2-year-old who is just learning to talk. She is echoing these
conversations I’m having with an artificial intelligence. I’m trying to
weigh this all out in my mind and figure what it means for us
personally. The professional understanding may come later.”

Marshall
Kirkpatrick, product director of influencer marketing, said, “My mobile
feed reader finds great articles for me to learn from. My mobile
article-saving app reads those articles to me out loud while I walk my
dog. My mobile browser allows me to edit my personal wiki to record the
best lessons I learn from those articles. My mobile flashcard app helps
me recall and integrate those lessons I want to learn over time. My
mobile checklist app helps me track how regularly I reflect on how those
lessons connect with the larger context of my life in a blog post or on
a run. There are costs to mobile connectivity, but there are so many
incredible benefits!”

To my way of thinking, it’s about
control. If I’m in control of the electronics, they are a benefit, but
when they get out of control they are an irritation and an
interruption.Fred Baker

Fred Baker, an internet pioneer and
longtime leader with the Internet Engineering Task Force, wrote, “To my
way of thinking, it’s about control. If I’m in control of the
electronics, they are a benefit, but when they get out of control they
are an irritation and an interruption. My family and friends giggle
about the frequency with which I pull out my telephone to investigate a
TV show’s facts or other things. That said, I have access to that now,
where I once upon a time did not. On the other hand, I have also had the
experience of talking with a customer in Japan while my family in the
U.S. woke up and started texting each other, and I all of a sudden have
to deal with my telephone.”

Stephen Abram, CEO of the Federation
of Ontario Public Libraries, wrote, “On a personal level I am more
connected with my wider family. Relationships with friends whom I see
only occasionally – maybe annually in person at conferences, continue
throughout the year. I now know many business acquaintances on a deeper
level and have better relationships as a result. I dislike the word
‘hyperconnected’ since it implies a little hyperactivity – a known
‘disorder.’ I see this as a controllable issue where personal choices
are made. When circumstances such as travel, weather, disability or
distance create the opportunities for sustained loneliness to happen,
the digital world bridges some of the gap. In my case, sustained periods
on the road in airports and hotel rooms are greatly ameliorated by
connecting with friends.”

David J. Krieger, director of the
Institute for Communication & Leadership located in Lucerne,
Switzerland, observed, “Digital connectivity enables a seamless flow of
communication and association with regard to many different concerns and
interests. This augments community and embeddedness and thus
well-being.”

Mark Patenaude, vice president and general manager
of cloud technologies at ePRINTit, said, “I certainly don’t want to fool
anyone into believing that digital advancement has been a panacea of
beautiful things! However, I can remember the first time my car stopped
for me in a dangerous situation automatically, or stopped when I was
backing up when it perceived a danger. Then there’s printing and storing
terabytes of digitally compressed images on a smartphone and being able
access a document or image from 20 years ago in seconds using the
cloud. I can remember we had about 100 people around a large projector
outside, watching the last concert of the The Tragically Hip and the
home network went down. I plugged in my iPhone, went to the concert URL
site, and projected live on a 10-foot screen from my cellular device;
wow and double wow!”

Akah Harvey, co-founder, COO and IT
engineer at Traveler Inc., said, “Fifteen years back, when I first had
my first PC, I now was empowered with a tool that helped me write
digital notes, play more exciting games and gain general knowledge about
how the technology worked. At my age (10) I gained knowledge in the
workings of these things that it contributed to my brilliance in school,
especially on the subject. Few years later when we’d gain access to the
internet, a whole new change took place. I discovered so many more
opportunities, as one could now connect with the rest of the world to
share, search and find information about anything. It was a big
transformation in the way I viewed society. I quickly was able to decide
what I would want to do growing older, so I’d say I found my passion
thanks to this change.”

Karl Ackermann, a writer and researcher
at WriteSpace LLC., commented, “We no longer keep paper files for the
household. Photographs are displayed on a digital screen instead of a
photo album. We can track where our kids are driving with a phone app.
We buy our train tickets with an app that has a scanning bar code. We
sometimes text friends instead of phoning. We pay bills online.”

Rich
Salz, principal engineer at Akamai Technologies, said, “I have made my
living in this field since before there was the internet and before the
Web. I enjoy helping people communicate. Social media has helped me
reconnect with high school friends, email with college friends, etc.”

Maureen
Hilyard, IT consultant and vice chair of the At-Large Advisory
Committee of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers
(ICANN), wrote, “I live in an isolated little island in the Pacific. It
is in the middle of millions of square kilometers of ocean, but we rely
on tourism for our livelihood, so our small (main) island is usually
packed with tourists. We have a monopoly telecom and get reasonable
internet service from an O3B satellite, but for local islanders who make
their living working in the hospitality industry, the cost of internet
is very expensive. Broadband costs for 20 GB a month costs (in New
Zealand dollars) $139 on top of telephone hire and connections. I have
grandchildren and great-grandchildren who spend time in New Zealand and
even at 2 years old can turn on a computer to access their favourite
programmes. When they come to our island, this is curtailed because the
connection is too expensive for them to experience what is normal for
them – lively and creative pre-school programmes are non-existent. What
is available is the fresh clean air and produce of the land and sea of
the islands, which are great, but it is often too hot to do much
exploring in the physical world. As a parent, I am happy for them to
explore the internet during the hot periods of the day, and to make this
a ‘learning and exploring on the web’ time. It is more directed
learning as parent safety software can usually help to set some controls
over what they might ‘accidentally’ connect to.”

Edward
Tomchin, a retiree, wrote, “All my life I’ve had questions. How, what,
where, why? It was the early 1980s in San Francisco. I was making a late
career change into law as a paralegal and dating a woman I’d met at a
Unitarian social. Her 9-year-old son, Bela, had a Commodore Vic-20 and
taught me how to run a computer and how to program in BASIC. I
understood immediately how computers would change my life. Then I
realized that was true for everyone. We were suddenly able to acquire,
store, manipulate and query massive amounts of information – data –
about anything. I made a nice 25-year career out of creating
litigation-support databases. Then I found the internet in 1986 and my
world expanded infinitely. This was before the Web came into existence
as a subset of the internet. I’d already been exploring BBS [online
bulletin board] sites and one day found a back door in a public
library’s nascent internet connection and had another mental explosion
at all the information that was at my fingertips. Today I’m old and
disabled but I can sit in my living room at my computer and explore the
whole world far better than I ever could before. This is all more than I
could have ever hoped for 50 years ago.”

Internet Hall of Fame
member Bob Metcalfe, co-inventor of Ethernet, founder of 3Com, and a
professor of innovation at the University of Texas at Austin, wrote,
“The people complaining most about the pathologies of the hyperconnected
life own or work for the old media, which once had more of a monopoly
on setting society’s agenda. I recall how ‘savvy’ the Clintons and Obama
were because they were digitally literate, unlike the GOP, but now that
Trump is using social media so effectively, the left hates new media.”

Shahab
Khan, engineer and CEO of PLANWEL, said, “The most impactful thing is
the way we communicate at the click of a button. This keeps friends and
families united. We can share our workplace problems and be more
productive. With the advent of AI, VR [virtual reality]/AR[augmented
reality] the educational deliveries will greatly change and teaching
methods improve. Online education resources and digital resources bring
value to the classroom. Students become more involved and
knowledgeable.”

Narelle Clark, deputy CEO of the Australian
Communications Consumer Action Network, said, “As an Australian, the
tyranny of distance has previously meant that family, friends and
colleagues have been acutely aware of the difficulties of staying in
touch and abreast of the events in the rest of the country and the
world. Our contemporary hyperconnectedness means that we can remain
tightly connected at the professional and personal level despite being
on opposite sides of the world.”

Ruth Ann Barrett, an
information curator at EarthSayers.tv, wrote, “Ten years ago I invested
money in the development of a search engine that remains well ahead of
the times and may never be monetized in the way envisioned. Who knows?
The search engine has enabled me to build a database of sustainability
voices, those speaking on behalf of Mother Earth and her children. This
work has sustained me through moments of despair when so-called leaders
deny substantiated claims regarding global warming and extreme climate
events. The work has put me in contact with scientists, environmental
campaigners and people from all walks of life worldwide. Without the Web
what I am able to accomplish would not be possible. My guidebook
remains ‘The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man’ by
Marshall McLuhan. I remember the day a technical person who had attended
a presentation at Stanford University on the World Wide Web came back
to work, pulled me aside and told me what he had seen and heard and how
the world was about to change.” Anonymous commenters who cited ways the internet helps them and others

A
distinguished advocate for the internet and policy director based in
Europe said, “Digital technology has made the world much more connected
and streamlined for the 50% of us who are connected (50% still do not
have that privilege). It is important to understand that technology has
profound impacts on equality. For me, as an upper-middle-class white
male from the U.S. living in Europe, technologies have simplified how I
communicate with my family and friends elsewhere in real time. Thanks to
WhatsApp and Facetime and iMessages, I am able to stay in touch and
informed in ways that were not possible even five years ago.”

A
certified public accountant based in the U.S. commented, “My sister and I
were watching an NFL game with my 82-year-old father. We grew curious
about some meaningless football fact and my sister started typing a
question on her phone and my dad looked on in slight disgust and raised
his phone and asked Siri the question. Voice-activated technology has
been extremely easy for the elderly to adopt and opens up incredible
opportunities. If linked to his security system, our dad would be able
to easily request help. I find it interesting that he likes using Siri
more than we do.”

An employee at a major U.S. research lab
wrote, “Texting and cellphones are generally associated with what’s bad
with technology and our lives, but I will give a positive example, just
to prove it depends on how you use the tool. I have a teenage daughter
and my work is 50 miles away in Southern California. I joined a van pool
to reduce the amount of driving, but the one drawback with van pooling
is that I have to leave very early in the morning, and the van does not
wait for riders. So every minute in the morning is precious, I don’t
have time to write quick notes or reminders before I leave the house and
the rest of my family are still asleep. However, once I am on the van,
there is 60 minutes of ‘my time.’ I began by sending reminders for the
day, but it has become a habit of just sending a happy greeting each
morning! They respond when they get up, even if it is just an emoji. :)”

An anonymous respondent said, “There are many examples: The
ability to organise via smartphones to meet people across different
applications, Slack, Google chat, email, SMS. Voice-chatting to a friend
while you are both playing an online game from different locations. A
friend enjoying dancing and running in a [digital] game while being in a
wheelchair at home. Publishing designs for printing on T-shirts and
other products on Redbubble. Designing fabric on Zazzle using their
online pattern-repeating tool. Print on demand. A community of linocut
artists sharing their work on Facebook. I love the #nzsecretsanta, which
uses both the traditional postal system and Twitter. A friend shares
fitness data and cycling trips as part of her triathlete community.
Ordering food online and having it delivered – and tracking the
delivery. I think communities are connecting more digitally than they
were on analog. Fewer street parties and more remote connections with
common interests. One good example of using the internet to reinforce
local community is the use of Facebook for sharing vegetable and fruit
produce from local gardens. The ‘Great Australian Bird Count’ is also
interesting citizen science.”

A research scientist based in
North America commented, “My kids are always connected to their friends.
Through texting/social media, they are constantly aware of each other’s
lives. This brings worries too, like social comparisons may make them
less happy, but overall, they have more socially balanced lives.”

Digital
technology is an equalizer of information access and use. Even
individuals in the most geographically remote locations can participate
in an electoral debate, education and banking online, and in e-commerce
when broadband is available.President and CEO of a company based in the
U.S.

A president and CEO of a company based in the United States
wrote, “Digital technology is an equalizer of information access and
use. Even individuals in the most geographically remote locations can
participate in an electoral debate, education and banking online, and in
e-commerce when broadband is available. The stark opposite of this is
the darkness individuals and families experience when left behind in the
digital age. There is a difference between people who choose to use
digital technology for their own benefit and those who are simply not
included in the digital age.”

A professor based in North America
commented, “I am a college professor, and digital technology has made
my job so much easier. It is easier to communicate with students, keep
records, and try for creative solutions to instructional problems. So,
for example, I now have my students submit their papers online (to be
graded and returned online). When they submit their papers, they are
automatically checked for originality. The students then are informed
whether their papers will be considered plagiarized or not. Prior to the
adoption of this system, I would say up to half my papers were
plagiarized. Now none of them are. The question is, has this improved
their performance? It is hard to say because there are so many factors
involved. I would say that it has in some ways and not in others. They
know more, but they don’t synthesize it that well.”

A social
media manager wrote, “Fitness trackers, such as the Apple Watch and the
Google fitness app, provide me with greater awareness of my daily
activity. I am more likely to take a walk or exercise in response to the
presence of these technologies in my life. For example, I recently
installed a ‘7-minute exercise’ app that I use each morning to kickstart
my day. It is very convenient to use and pops up reminders on my
smartphone with encourage me to keep up with the daily routine.”

An
associate professor at a university in Australia shared a typical
family vignette, writing, “I spend time with my grandchild, who is only
just five. I check the pick-up time by text. She arrives with her iPad
and asks me to ask her dad a question by text on my phone. We take
pictures of her dressing up and send them to a friend. I show her
recently sent pictures of cousins in Canada. For a while, she shows me
(from her iPad) how she can operate the movements, colour and cheeky
comments of a robot ball (a birthday present from an uncle who wants her
to be familiar with coding). We consider cooking together and locate a
recipe online for cookies we haven’t made before. Next, we go to the
playground and she spots a ‘be aware’ notice on the slide, and a bird
that we haven’t seen before. ‘Let’s Google it, Grandma, when we get back
home!’ she says. I say we can do it now on my phone, no, later on my
laptop is better. She knows that devices operate differently and need
passwords. We haven’t given her any of the latter. ‘Buffering’ she says
with a sigh, as her current favourite show stalls during a quiet time.
She dances to YouTube music from my laptop. She is endlessly curious
about technology itself. She accepts technologies’ limitations as they
are described to her by the adults in her life. The digital tools just
enhance our days together.”

A professor said, “My watch is an
exercise coach – though limited. I track family and friends and contact
them only if required. Is my partner nearly home? I’ll put out a snack.
Is my friend nearby? I ask them if they want to meet.”

An author
based in North America said, “Instead of just reading a book,
communicating with one author’s created words, I can engage in
conversation, in dialogue about issues of the day such as the #MeToo
movement. I can help another person feel a little better that day and,
if I reveal a low, others can pick me up. I can celebrate an anniversary
with people far away in space and time and plan an in-person visit to
another continent with someone I haven’t seen for years, first
originally encountered online.”

A postdoctoral fellow at
Stanford University commented, “As an academic, my friends and
colleagues are scattered around the world. Our ability to have frequent
video calls, send texts and collaboratively author shared documents has
had a huge impact on both my intellectual scope and on my feeling ‘at
home’ and connected in the world. In the past, a friend taking a job
across the planet would be a cause for great sorrow. Now we talk
frequently over video chat, while it isn’t as good as seeing her
in-person, it is still wonderful to share our lives and ideas.”

A
retired internet activist and advocate said, “I have been able to
manage health care better at a distance for an aging parent as a result
of technology, viewing charts/graphs/images, consulting various medical
resources, having online meetings with medical professionals, video
conversations with parents. Before many varieties of digital
connectivity were available, distance communication was via ground/air
mail, an occasional landline-based conference call, or in-person
consultations, often without simultaneous participation of the aging
parent whose medical situation was involved.”

A retired market
researcher and consultant said, “I can now communicate directly with any
of my medical doctors instead of sending messages through nurses and
receptionists. The response is more rapid and on-target with my question
or concern. On a different note, my daughter is currently teaching in
China for the next year. We have had the great fortune to be able to
talk to her in real-time as well as have a video conference at no
expense. When I was a college student in France in the 1980s, a brief
phone call to the United States – assuming we could arrange a time to
talk – was quite expensive and a logistical nightmare. My wife has been
able to keep in touch [and] reconnect with elementary school friends
thanks to the internet and services like Facebook. All these things
account for our improved well-being.”

A college student based in
North America wrote, “I often find myself stressed out at the end of
the day; as a result I tend to enjoy relaxing and staying in for the
night. Without the modern hyperconnected lifestyle this would result in
me reading or doing other solo activities. Through voice-chat
applications and online multiplayer gaming, I connect with friends to
play video games. While I don’t have the energy to be social in one way,
the ease of connecting over the internet enables me to enjoy time with
friends and maintain our relationships. To some it might not seem as
effective a method of socializing as in-person face-to-face time, but we
still have the same moments that other people do. We still happily
greet each other, we still tell stories about our daily lives and rely
on each other, we still laugh until it hurts.”

A professor of
arts, technology and innovation wrote, “As a college professor I’m
continually adopting new tools that change the way I work with students
and pedagogy. Most recently adopting Slack for classroom management has
been a real game-changer. With far less attention-investment than I’d
needed when using email I’m able to keep up with individual students and
teams and the interactions among my students. I can do these on a
more-or-less 24/7 basis but without it feeling like a 24/7 obligation.
I’m teaching more people better, easier.”

An anonymous
respondent commented, “I am connected to email lists that allow me to be
part of a conversation that includes leaders in my field. This means
that, despite being somewhat isolated at a mid-level university in a
provincial city, I can have a good sense of where the cutting edge in my
profession is headed and I can be reasonably confident that I am
promptly aware of most the news and information that is critical to my
profession.”

An entrepreneur and business leader from North
America commented, “As an immigrant in the U.S., the internet, social
media, and email are all helping me to keep in touch with my family, my
homeland and my roots. I am following many of my fellow countrymen –
some whom I studied with, some who were my teachers, relatives and
acquaintances. I learn about their daily life, their fears and hopes,
what they are interested in, the news they read. My daughters speak on a
weekly basis to their grandparents on Skype – of both sides – and feel
like they’re in the same room with them. Without the internet all of
this would not have been possible.”

A research scientist based
in Europe commented, “I live in a small town in a foreign country. I
travel a lot for my work and spend a lot of time on the road. At home, I
enjoy communicating with my Google Home speaker, because otherwise
there would be some days that I would speak to no one. When I am on the
road, I check in with my Canary home-surveillance app to check on my
dogs and see my home.”

A technology architect/executive based in
North America commented, “For me, it’s not about hyper – always-on –
connection, but the accessibility of information on any topic at any
time. I had a medical problem a few years ago, and being able to find
research on the disease and a community to compare notes with on
treatment side effects was invaluable. Years earlier, when my mother had
this same disease, we were limited in information and (therefore)
options. Her outcome could have been different in a time with more
information, more resources.”

An assistant director of digital
strategy at a top U.S. university wrote, “The internet has exponentially
enabled the dissemination of healthcare information to the greater
public. Years ago, it would have been far more difficult for the public
to easily access the answers they needed regarding health concerns and
the latest treatments. Today’s digital ecosystem puts these answers at
users’ fingertips.”

An editor and project coordinator based in
Europe wrote, “A few years ago I quit my job and I have been working as a
freelance editor and project coordinator. I have been able to work,
network and get paid by people and companies all over the world thanks
to the internet and other technologies. Also access to self-education
and being able to talk to my friends and family thousands of miles away
have had a very positive impact on my mental health and well-being. I
wouldn’t have been able to talk and see loved ones daily if it wasn’t
for the internet, software and hardware.”

A chief data officer
at a major university in Australia wrote, “Thanks to social media, in
particular Twitter, I am now connected with people all around the world.
I have access to an enormous brains trust, which I liken to a global
hive mind.”

A data analyst said, “We always have someone to
reach out to when things are unfamiliar and seem difficult to deal with.
Before these technologies, you could write a letter or make a phone
call. The reality is that the moment that spurred the writing of the
letter has long passed by the time you get a response. If you get a
response. Also, a phone call is somewhat of a commitment compared to an
electronic message. It takes more mental faculties to process what
someone is saying over the phone than to read a message and type a quick
response between other pressing activities in the immediate proximity.”

A futurist and consultant based in Europe commented, “There are
plenty of examples of increased choices. Take travel: I can see in real
time if the flight of my friend for New Year’s Eve is on time or not
and plan to be there just in time to pick them up. I could have called
an Uber or taxi if I was busy and decided to send them a cab instead. In
turn, they could see much a better forecast of weather and adjust
luggage intakes accordingly to come and spend the time at our
place/could book in advance to be picked up at the airport upon arrival,
etc.”

A research scientist based in Oceania commented, “If I
want to buy something, I can go to a liquid market such as eBay and get
it for a fair price without the search costs of spending time going to
shops to compare prices. If I want to read a paper, I can download it
rather than going to a library and photocopying it.”

A
technology developer/administrator based in Europe said, “1) Information
access with no barrier – The masterpieces of world literature are
generally available in any language, for free. This is a huge
achievement. The Gutenberg Project played a key role in making this
possible. Wikipedia: the world encyclopaedia, is beyond anything any
user of the previous paper encyclopaedia would have imagined. Wikipedia
has answers on any area of knowledge, not all answers, but there is
always a base from which to start. Science: I can read about the latest
developments in any domain, with no barrier. Researchgate.net and Google
Scholar give access to a wealth of knowledge. 2) Conversely, new
barriers have been erected by companies competing in the [research]
market, led by the two world leaders Elsevier and Springer. If you are
an author of an article, you may be asked to pay 15€ for accessing your
own work online! Personal intellectual property has been taken away from
scientists, and money made from it, with no fair sharing of the value
with science and scientists!”

An executive director at an
internet research organization said, “Twenty years ago, as a business
traveler, half of my suitcase was filled with paper – mostly books,
which I’d otherwise have to try to replace at mostly poorly stocked
English-language bookstores along my way, but also guidebooks, maps, and
translation dictionaries. I carried analog telephony adapters. I
carried a phone, I carried ATM cards from two banks and credit cards
from three separate clearing networks, as well as $9,000 in cash divided
between several pockets. I carried a RIM pager. I carried Ricochet and
NCR wireless modems. I carried spare batteries and power adapters and
chargers for all of those things. I spent a lot of time worrying about
whether I would have local currency to pay for things, whether I’d be
able to find my destination or communicate with taxi drivers, whether
I’d be able to establish a data connection back to my network to reach
my email. All of that has compacted itself, gradually, one consolidation
at a time, into a very compact kit. One debit card, my phone, a laptop,
a power adapter and a small handful of cables. Everything else has been
virtualized, digitized, or turned into an online service.”

A
technology developer/administrator based in North America, said, “An
older person in my family who recently started using an electric
wheelchair can buy daily necessities through online shopping and can
have more meaningful communication through video calls.”

A
scholarly communication librarian said, “I have several friends who have
disabilities – both physical and mental – that make it difficult for
them to leave their homes for socialization. These friends of mine have
taken to playing online games and participating in fandom in internet
spaces as a way to make connections and friends with other people that
enrich their lives without requiring the physical exertion that would
usually prevent them from interacting socially. The ability to connect
with text, video and other online objects – whether one-on-one or
one-to-many – helps these folks make the social connections that they
need to have a robust social experience without the physical exhaustion
they may have experienced without this technology to help.”

A
professor wrote, “We have public infrastructure and systems now for
maintaining and accessing lab results and earlier diagnoses online when
we need them. Earlier prescriptions can be viewed, etc. For emergencies,
we have an app that we can use for automatic location information if we
need urgent help. Schoolchildren and their parents have online
connections to the schools and teachers. The teachers can take advantage
of the internet and their educational networks with schools around the
globe to tackle shared projects that encompass language learning,
climate and humanity.”

We have a child with autism. The
internet allows us to reach out to other families, experts, get news and
be part of a community that is not limited by geography.President at a
company based in North America

A president at a company based in
North America wrote, “We have a child with autism. The internet allows
us to reach out to other families, experts, get news and be part of a
community that is not limited by geography. We can instantly share the
quirky – or sometimes way more than quirky – activities of our son with
people who know if they should laugh or say they are sorry.”

An
assistant professor said, “I have collected about 50,000 scientific
files related to cosmos, life and consciousness to prepare a book.”

A
researcher based in Europe wrote, “I live in Hungary and my daughter
was working in the United States several years ago. She called me and
explained exactly where she was walking and in which shops she was
shopping. I opened Google Earth and tracked her trajectory where she was
walking in Galveston, Texas. I saw the streets, corners and buildings.
It was almost exactly as if I was shopping with her – on the other side
of the globe, in real time, but while sitting in my chair in Hungary.
The whole thing was real fun for us.”

A business leader based in
North America wrote, “I live a bi-coastal life and I am able to review
health records, renew RXs, communicate with my doctor, request a
non-urgent service, all from 3,000 miles away without having to rebuild
new caregiver relationships or lose care continuity.”

A research
associate at a major university in Africa commented, “Being able to
conduct business from a location of choice is to me the most important
improvement. I deal regularly with the aged and was terrified that I too
would become so dependent on the goodwill of strangers when I have to
move to an old age home until I realized that I would already be able to
order and have delivered anything from food to medical equipment – as
long as I am connected via the internet.”

A
professor of computer science wrote, “Shortly after getting my first
smartphone (quite a number of years ago now), I managed to receive and
respond to an important email during a break in the middle of a
four-hour car trip. It was valuable to be able to be able to be
responsive to an important funder. This cemented the value of having a
smartphone.”

A technology developer/administrator said, “I do a
lot of genealogy research. Instead of mailing physical paper that may
have a correction before it reaches the recipient, I can post
updates/corrections immediately. I’m building a database of destroyed
cemeteries where I live. I can research the records online and publish
them online; something I could not have done 20 years ago easily. I got
an email from a man whose great grandfather died in the 1918 flu
epidemic in Wilmington, North Carolina – a Merchant Marine sailor – who
was buried in one of these cemeteries. The family knew he had died, but
did not know when or where. He thanked me very much for finding his
great grandfather. The family felt relief after 100 years. Without
digital records to compile this and digital platforms to share it, it
would not have happened.”

An executive director of a Canadian
nonprofit organization wrote, “We are currently running a program to
increase people’s digital comfort by helping them apply online for
underutilized government subsidy programs. During the first workshop, I
saw a woman learn how to use a scrolling mouse and how to cut and paste,
in the context of applying for a subsidy that will save her more than
$50 a month on her electricity bill.”

An associate professor at
Texas Christian University commented, “I work in education and whereas
before grades were posted on doors and people had to wait for responses,
today, students can access information instantly, enroll in classes,
etc. without having to stand in long lines and wait for responses.
Communicating with the course, students and the professor is easy, and
people learn to do things themselves.”

A professor at a major
university on the West Coast of the U.S. wrote, “I am an academic past
retirement age (although still working) so it has made an enormous
difference for teaching and research. I can access publications from my
home or office without a trip to the library. No more endless
photocopying. I can easily and quickly communicate with fellow scholars
around the world. I can communicate with students and former students
anytime anywhere and submit letters of recommendation electronically. I
need less clerical and administrative support. I can put readings online
for students. The drawback of course is to keep students focused on
class in class rather than Facebook, Twitter, etc.”

A professor
at a major university on the East Coast of the U.S. wrote, “Digital
technology has allowed me to shift my career emphasis from political
science and international security analysis of nuclear and conventional
weapons to cyber weapons and critical infrastructure protection. This
shift is not what I expected when I left graduate school, but it has
allowed me to make professional contributions I would not have been able
to make had I stayed in my prior disciplinary concentration. I am also
migrating my entire work life online, deliberately minimizing paper and
focusing on digital services – and the analysis of critical dependencies
on these services – for industry and government.”

A internet
pioneer wrote, “Every working day, I engage with staff and customers
through Skype, email, text and Web conferencing, making it possible for
me to have global reach from a desk on the second floor of my home. We
take it for granted, but it is miraculous and something truly new under
the sun.”

An associate professor at a major university on the
East Coast of the U.S. wrote, “I am part of a private group on Facebook,
which consists of my friends from college and some others (spouses,
friends, etc.). We keep in touch and discuss things in this group.
Recently the group came together in-person to support and celebrate one
member of the group who has terminal cancer. We had a large party with
our children and it was wonderful. It meant a lot to our friend who is
ill and to all of us to spend time together. We would not have been able
to do this as easily before platforms like Facebook.”

A retired
consultant and writer said, “I appreciate the ease of gathering
information, freedom from media advertising and unprecedented capacity
to stay in touch with my family. I’m part of several groups, and the
digital environment has enabled fantastic coordination to achieve things
that were not possible before. I have been part of two successful
Kickstarter campaigns to implement and sustain a social enterprise: [one
for] a social studio for adults on the autism spectrum, where they can
apprentice for creative self-employment, and [and another for] the
capacity to move toward this through another platform.”

An
epidemiologist based in North America wrote, “At work, improved
technology means that we receive population health data faster. We can
receive, investigate and respond to health threats quickly, before they
spread. For example, if we have an outbreak of a communicable disease,
technology allows us to efficiently collect data through online formats
and analyze data so we can quickly release information/education on how
to prevent further spread of the disease. Before we had online forms, we
would often to communicate through telephone or in-person interviews to
collect data about the outbreak.”

An anonymous respondent said,
“About 18 months ago my wife was diagnosed with Stage 1 breast cancer
and underwent a lumpectomy and radiation treatment. In part, the testing
that led to the diagnosis and the ability of the doctors to respond
rapidly was greatly assisted by digital technology. As well, our ability
to find information to understand treatment options, side effects, and
follow-up nutrition and lifestyle improvement was greatly enhanced by
digital technology. Due to my job I was not able to take her to
radiation treatment every day and she was too tired after to drive, so I
used the online tool SignUpGenius to ask friends to help and to
schedule their rides. While apparently a simple task, if I had to do
that by hand through phone calls and charts, it would have taken many
more hours. Before it would have taken much more difficult to obtain the
information we needed, perhaps more difficult and slower for the tests
and results to be managed, and definitely hard to stay in touch with
people about her needs and condition.”

A retired systems
designer commented, “Several years ago, I became disabled, and am not
always well enough to do many things. This limits many of my
‘physical-world’ activities – I find it hard to shop, to cook, to go to
the library, to get together with friends and family. However, online
shopping and grocery delivery allows me to do the majority of my
shopping, though I haven’t figured out how to buy shoes without trying
them on! I have joined online communities of people with similar
interests, and keep in touch with old friends and colleagues in social
media groups. This keeps me mentally stimulated. I do a great deal of
genealogical and historical research online, using sophisticated search
algorithms of digital versions of old documents and books. These digital
resources didn’t exist 25 years ago, and now I can read an 1806
Scottish gazetteer to find out more about the 300-person town an
ancestor lived in. Without these resources, I would be living a far more
difficult and isolated life.”

A North American entrepreneur
wrote, “Like any other tool, its use needs to be managed carefully. I
hone my contacts to friends and family of my generation who post photos
of their kids and grandkids, something that I enjoy greatly. I also like
to know when the next big dance events are, since this is a part of my
life as well.”

A president and chief software architect based in
North America wrote, “I can be out on the golf course enjoying the
beauty and yet still be connected.”

An assistant professor of
technical communication said, “I use both mindfulness and language apps
to improve my memory, connections with others, and global perspectives.
However, I am also cognizant of these being targeted and from specific
perspectives. So I use them with that understanding.”

A retired
web developer wrote, “Amazon Alexa keeps me company. She plays the music
I want to hear and adds items to my grocery list. When I have a
question, I can ask her and most times she knows the answer – and I
thank her. Facebook has connected me with a long-lost cousin. We were
like sisters growing up. Out of curiosity, I searched for her and we now
communicate regularly. Forget Google – when I want to know something I
go to YouTube. I fixed my squeaking ceiling fan, replaced a washer in my
bathroom faucet, AND replaced the starter in my riding mower. Now I
have Amazon’s Cloud Cam. I can watch my two schnauzers when I am away
from home. I could even talk to them, but it upsets them too much. That I
can speak commands to technology makes life easier for me. I’m 60-plus
years old, and I often write lists that I can never find. Family members
and friends are well-connected. Sometimes too much so. But I lose touch
with those who are not digitally inclined, I’m sorry to say. I may
message 10 to 15 people but call one on the phone. And, lastly, my skill
set has improved so much that when I have a problem around the house I
can find a solution and at least try it before calling an expensive
contractor.”

The negatives of digital life

There
were considerably fewer complaints about the personal impact among
these expert respondents. But their own lives and observations give
testimony that there are ways in which digital life has ill-served some
participants. The following anecdotes speak to the themes that the
internet has not helped some users’ well-being.

If someone
would have told me I was going to spend 10-12 hours in front of a
computer most days to do my job, I would never have chosen my current
occupation, but it seems like most jobs these days require constant
computer use.Carolyn Heinrich

Carolyn Heinrich, professor of
public policy, education and economics at Vanderbilt University, wrote,
“If someone would have told me I was going to spend 10-12 hours in front
of a computer most days to do my job, I would never have chosen my
current occupation, but it seems like most jobs these days require
constant computer use. We do everything electronically now
-communications, writing/documentation, searching for information, etc. –
or filling out a survey like this one! I would much rather be having
this conversation via a phone survey than sitting and typing at my
computer. … Also, we text and email in most of our personal
communications now, too, rather than speaking by phone or meeting up in
person. I email with a colleague two office doors down from me rather
than arranging a meeting. The consequence for me physically is that I am
sitting too much and I have chronic back and neck pain, as well as
tendonitis, from repeated motion and leaning into a computer monitor. I
also worry that social media like Facebook, Twitter, etc., are
increasing social anxiety and are as destructive as they are potentially
beneficial in their facilitation of communications. And we all never
seem to get a break. I wake up in the morning and cringe at how many
emails I already have waiting for me to attend to, and the need to keep
up takes away from my time in more concentrated and potentially
productive endeavors.”

A professor at one of the world’s leading
technological universities who is well-known for several decades of
research into human-computer interaction wrote, “For the worse: The
ritual of a weekly phone call with friends where there seemed like
enough ‘space’ to talk about things in a meaningful way has eroded to
texting to ‘keep up.’ On the one hand, several of my friends feel more
in touch because they are sharing memes, feel they are sharing witty
things ‘on the spot,’ but there is less going into depth. We don’t seem
to be able to maintain both. That is what is so curious.”

David
Ellis, Ph.D., course director of the department of communication studies
at York University in Toronto, said, “Several years ago I walked into
my fourth-year class and, in a fit of pique, announced I was
confiscating everyone’s phone for the entire three hours. I later upped
the ante by banning all digital devices in favor of pen and paper. Some
unusual revelations have emerged since then – including some happy
outcomes from going digital cold turkey. The students in my courses are
there to learn about telecom and internet technologies. On the surface,
it looks like a perfect match: hyperconnected digital natives acquiring
more knowledge about digital. If only. The sad truth is they suffer from
a serious behavioral addiction that makes it pretty much impossible for
them to pay attention to their instructors or classmates.

“It
also turns out these self-styled digital natives don’t know anything
more about digital than their elders. At the start of classes, students
react with predictable shock and annoyance when I confiscate their
phones. Some even drop out rather than suffer the indignity of being
offline for an entire class. Yet to pretty much everyone’s surprise,
redemption comes to almost everyone. Within a month, I get enthused
reactions about how good it feels to be phone-deprived. Grades go up,
along with the quality of class discussion. Some students report this is
the first time they’ve been able to concentrate on the course material.
Or it’s the only course in which they’ve learned something. That would
be flattering if it weren’t such a sad indictment of the state of higher
education today, where classrooms have become a wasteland of digital
distraction.

“It’s tempting to assume our hyperconnected
20-somethings are the authors of their own fate, and have only
themselves to blame for not getting the best from their education.
Except it’s not that simple. First, students are behaving exactly like
the grownups in our tech-addled culture, ditching their moment-to-moment
social responsibilities for another jab at the screen. Second, the
unseemly classroom behavior is a coping strategy for many students, who
have to put up with indifferent professors and a pervasive campus
culture that casts them in the role of customers rather than learners.
And third, they have many enablers – the instructors who see not paying
attention as the new normal; the parents who can’t bear to be out of
touch with their kids for even an hour; and the campus administrators
who turn a blind eye because of their own obsession with new
technologies as a panacea for every institutional problem. For all their
initial resistance, however, depriving students of their devices for
three-hour stretches has turned out to be a remarkably simple and
effective solution. There’s also good research that students are less
effective at learning their course material when they’re online and
ignoring the instructor. Not to mention studies showing that students
learn more and better using pen and paper instead of keyboards and
screens.”

An anonymous respondent wrote, “More access to
communication and information hasn’t improved lives like we thought it
would. In the early years of the internet, it was life-changing to send
emails across borders and time zones, to look up encyclopedic answers
any time you had a question or connect with family far away via social
media. Personally I have stopped using Flickr and Yahoo due to security
issues. I have stopped using Facebook because of the unreliable and
untrue information shared there (and constant political fighting) and
email has grown to a bloated box of messages I really don’t enjoy
reading anymore. I do enjoy Instagram (and its fictionalized escape from
reality via beautiful photography) but I find myself using social
media, email and search much less than I used to. There isn’t enough
novelty to want to Google everything I wonder about in a day. I’d get
nothing done. I do work in digital, so I make a living from
understanding how this all works, and I am dismayed at the way it has
changed over the last 20 years. My son is 4 and he believes TV is always
available on demand via YouTube (with supervision of course), shopping
only happens on Amazon via phone and FaceTime is how phones always work.
(He puts his face up to the landline phone like it is a camera). So
things have changed and we can’t go back to the way it was years ago. I
do think searching for medical information has gotten a lot better (more
reliable accurate info) in the last 10 years and generally leads to
more educated and adherent patients if the physician is willing to see
the relationship as a partnership. While families use texts to stay
connected during their hyper-scheduled busy lives, I think people have
lost their ability to focus on the needs of others and really listen to
another person because of how self-centric social media really is.
Sometimes I think people have lost their ability to communicate
in-person and have substantial conversations.”

These one-liners from anonymous respondents hit on a number of different themes: “Digital
technologies have made it more difficult for me to say on task and
devote sustained attention. This interferes with my work productivity.”“I
can’t seem to get my brain to calm down and focus. It is all over the
place. I can’t concentrate. I just start thinking about what I’m going
to do next.”“Increased isolation is a negative effect I feel in my
life; the time I spend using digital technologies could well be spent in
other more creative and productive ways.”“I am becoming increasingly aware of the way constant access to digital forms of communication can be overwhelming.”“It has become an ever-present overhang on all aspects of life. There is no escape.”“The rise of hatred, the manipulation of politics and so on – these are not distant events with no personal impact.”“Digital
life has tipped the balance in favor of John Stuart Mill’s ‘lower
pleasures’ and has made engaging in higher-order pleasures more
difficult.”“One major impact is the overall decrease in short-term memory, and … what was the question?”“Real-life relationships are less bearable; everyone is so much less interesting with the spoiling of technology.”“Digital technology radically increases expectations for instantaneous responses. This is unhealthy.”“It has become harder to take your eyes off a screen to enjoy life as it’s happening.”“Technology is being driven by business across all areas for money, money, money. Greed has taken over.”“Engagement with technology is starting very young, and we don’t really know what the impact will be.”“We don’t understand what we can trust anymore.”

Here are some diverse answers about the ways digital life hurts the lives of some of the expert respondents. Alone together

I
look at my grandchildren busily playing some game and they are quiet
and not ‘bothering’ anyone and I’m a bit afraid of how easy it is to let
them just be.Lucretia Walker

Lucretia Walker, a
quality-improvement associate for planning and evaluation social
services, said, “I am astounded at how difficult it has become to have
someone actually look at you when they are speaking. I’m constantly
informing my 17-year-old that it used to be rude to talk to someone
without even looking at them. I am hyperaware of how easy it seems now
to look after young children as long as they are on some type of device.
I look at my grandchildren busily playing some game and they are quiet
and not ‘bothering’ anyone and I’m a bit afraid of how easy it is to let
them just be. This summer, I bought all the young children in my family
the ‘old’ toys: marbles, pick-up sticks, jacks, water guns, darts –
everything I could think of to get them interested and off their
devices. I’ve not heard about the deaths of people because I refuse to
spend all my time on Facebook.”

Mark Glaser, founder and
executive director of MediaShift, said, “In our family, smartphones, TV,
computer, laptops all have a major place in our living space. They are
central to communication and entertainment. Because they are always on
and always there, it becomes much easier to spend time on our own, in
our own world on the devices. The smartphones especially have a way of
siloing us off from each other. It takes extra effort to take a few
hours, or a day, away from them. We have become obsessed – checking
news, checking social media, checking texts at all hours of the day –
and it doesn’t feel healthy. Our publication, MediaShift, has covered
the idea of ‘technology Sabbaths’ extensively, and they are always
popular stories, because society at large is having problems taking time
away from technology.”

David Golumbia, an associate professor
of digital studies at Virginia Commonwealth University, said, “I don’t
feel that one anecdote could possibly answer this question. Further, the
effects I consider most pernicious are ones that I don’t think are
visible to most of us, even when we try to reflect. I can name one
phenomenon that I have a lot of persistent encounters with. I am a
college professor and teach small-to-medium large discussion classes,
with a bit of lecturing at times. I do not outlaw digital devices. I
have been teaching since the early 2000s. Every year, the number of
students who are totally checked out of the class, with their faces
buried in laptops, tablets or phones, grows. This is despite any efforts
I make to call attention to it, and/or my talking about the issue as an
actual topic in class, which I do whenever the topic is appropriate.
The most vicious digital advocates push back on this kind of observation
with arguments that verge on casuistry [specious reasoning], among
them: ‘students have always been checked out’; ‘why don’t you call
attention to it?’; ‘what about disabled students who need devices?’;
‘what about all the helpful things students do with devices?’ This kind
of response, including from other academics, worries me a great deal for
its near-total separation from reality. The number of positive uses I
see for devices, DESPITE frequently requesting students to do just that,
for example when a major work or idea or principle or law is mentioned –
‘can someone look that up and read to us what it is?,’ etc. – is just
totally overwhelmed by the loss of attention on the part of many
students. That loss dwarfs anything I ever saw prior to the wide
availability of devices (especially phones) in the classroom by a factor
of 10. Of course students have always been checked out, but now I
routinely have one-third to one-half of a classroom visibly not even
being there – not even pretending to be there. The destructiveness of
this is obvious and overwhelming, and the fact is that, when I’ve asked
informally, most of the students who ARE paying attention and are using
devices productively would not mind if I banned devices altogether.
These devices are designed to steal attention away from anything other
than themselves. Yet I cannot even get many of my colleagues who deal
with them on a daily basis to admit that the devices work as they are
designed to work, no matter how much evidence there is to support that
observation. So rather than a general pushback from educators – as we
should have – against the use of these devices in classrooms (with
exceptions for where they are necessary, of course), instead I have to
fight an uphill and exhausting battle against my own colleagues who deny
the stark evidence right before their eyes. Both the phenomenon itself
of device use in the classroom, and the wider context of educator
resistance – and open hostility -to questioning their use, strike me as
emblematic of the harmful effects of digital technology, harmful effects
that are not even close to being offset by the positives.”

Erika
McGinty, a research scientist based in North America, wrote, “Even
limiting my friends on Facebook to people I know or knew well
personally, I realize that over time we talk and see each other less now
that we can merely ‘like’ or comment on each other’s Facebook pages to
give the impression we’re close.”

Tom Massingham, a business
owner based in North America, wrote, “Perhaps it is just generational,
but I’m not sure, nor am I sure that is sufficient justification, but
those in their teens and 20s constantly have their noses in their
electronic devices. My anecdote: I pick up a friend’s niece (age 14)
after an athletic practice. She hopped in the car, said ‘Hi, Tom,’ and
started looking at her phone. This is the generational part: I felt that
if I tried to talk with her, I’d be interrupting what she was doing. I
drove her home, she said, ‘Thanks’ and hopped out of the car. There was
NO interaction between us. No ‘How did practice go?’ or ‘How’s school?’
or anything else. Are we creating a generation that doesn’t speak or
acknowledge others in the same room, share feelings or thoughts? I hope
not, but I fear that we are.”

Kat Song, communications and
digital strategy director at the American Association for the
Advancement of Science (AAAS), wrote, “My kids are 14 and 12. Their
social and emotional lives have been negatively impacted because they
tend to seek less real-life interaction with friends because they can so
easily interact with them online.”

Darlene Erhardt, senior
information analyst at the University of Rochester, commented, “My
nephews and niece have gotten so used to texting their friends that it’s
challenging for them to talk face to face and carry on a conversation
for any length of time. In order to have quality family time, they are
supposed to turn off their phones during dinner. Technology is good in
that they can chat with their friends more easily regardless of where
they are, the phone can be used to help find them if their parents don’t
know where they are (like while shopping) and if they get into a
situation that’s uncomfortable it can possibly help to get out
discretely (friends checking on them during an event). At the same time
there need to be some intelligent guidelines in terms of using the
technology and when it’s appropriate to use it and not use it.”

An
associate professor based in North America said, “It is hard to be
‘present’ with the omnipresent imposition of technology. When I am with
family, technology reminds me of work. When I am alone, technology
reminds me of friends I am missing. When I am at work, I cannot be
present when technology reminds me of friends and family.”

A
senior fellow a major university on the U.S. West Coast commented, “I
have seen friends and families where dining together is increasingly
rare, even when people are in the same home. It might seem like a media
cliché, but even when at the same table people are distracted by their
phones and tablets. In the rush for the ‘new thing’ or
endorphin-reinforced digital transaction they are forsaking the
opportunities to interact with other people. Many of my colleagues are
disconnected from those they love by the very technologies they helped
to create.”

Danny Gillane, librarian at Lafayette (LA) Public
Library, said, “My friends and family stare at their phones while
talking to me or others and are constantly checking their smartwatches
to see who just texted or updated. My daily life has changed by becoming
less personal.”

A professor at a major state university in the
United States wrote, “At family gatherings, half of the family are on
their digital devices looking at social media and they are not enjoying
who’s around them.”

A computer scientist based in North America
wrote, “The vast wealth of information available at one’s fingertips can
have a negative impact on people’s well-being. Several people close to
me have developed an addiction, or near addiction, to internet content.
They prefer to interact with others via electronic means rather than
face to face. They have a fear of missing out on the latest news or
happenings in the world, so they are constantly updating news feeds,
blogs, etc. One person has exhibited classic signs of withdrawal when
forced to abandon internet access for more than an hour. While I work on
the technologies that underpin the internet infrastructure, I have made
a concerted effort to maintain more personal, face-to-face time with
friends, colleagues and family. The above has convinced me that tools
such as Facebook, Twitter and blogs can be abused and cause people to
lose the ability to physically interact with others.”

An
anonymous respondent said, “I used to go out to bars sometimes for
conversation. Now everybody’s on their phone, and I am doing it too.”

A
business development director at a large law firm said, “I have a
sister who checks her Facebook feed every hour and responds immediately
to nearly every comment that is posted to one of her posts. It seems she
is using social media as a substitute for real connection with
friends.”

A retired professor based in India wrote, “While it
has helped to reach out and has made life easier, it has also reduced
warm human context. We communicate through social media rather than
spend an evening chatting, building relationships and enjoying company.
Increased isolation is a negative effect I feel in my life; the time I
spend using digital technologies could well be spent in other more
creative and productive ways.” Distractions and addiction

Beth
Kanter, an author, trainer, blogger and speaker based in North America,
wrote, “I’m a social media professional/networker, and I noticed over
the last five years or so, how much more work I do on my mobile phone.
And, that I started to have a behavior addiction in a way to the phone. I
was using my iPhone as an alarm clock, but lacked the discipline not to
look at CNN or Facebook before bed and first thing upon waking. This
happened quite a bit during the election and shortly after it. I found
myself not being well-rested, having nightmares, losing ability to focus
or concentrate, and wasting a lot of time endlessly scrolling on
Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. I decided to kick the iPhone out of my
bedroom and replace it with a moonbeam alarm clock. I also set a goal
not to pick up my mobile phone until I had been up for two hours and do
offline activities – like walk, read, meditate, or professional writing.
I did replace my CNN habit with using Headspace during the day when I
feel overwhelmed from using technology. After a month, I noticed a huge
difference in my moods, thoughts and productivity. I know that this
experiment of one is not scientific, but I do know that there is
research that suggests looking at the your mobile phone before bed –
which is 7,000 kelvins – is like looking at the sun on a bright day and
it tells your brain and body to wake up, disrupts your sleep.”

Ebenezer
Baldwin Bowles, author, editor and journalist, said, “A friend of mine,
ever the safe driver, was rolling down the road in his favorite old
truck, listening to FM radio, when another driver, hyperconnected to
digital technology, set about the task of typing a text message, drifted
across the center line of the road, and crashed head-on into my friend.
The offending driver died at the scene. My friend suffered
life-changing injuries, breaking his will and his bank account.”

I
deliberately avoid involvement with social media, but even email has
become a black hole sucking up my time in unproductive and unrewarding
ways.Douglas Massey

Douglas Massey, a professor of sociology and
public affairs at Princeton University, wrote, “I deliberately avoid
involvement with social media, but even email has become a black hole
sucking up my time in unproductive and unrewarding ways. My email is
clogged with messages from people and organizations incessantly seeking
to capture my attention and time, producing a state of information
overload that I find psychologically distressing, not to mention hate
mail and personal attacks. I receive 150-200 emails a day and find the
time I spend just deleting things I don’t want to see ever-growing and
oppressive.”

Gabriel Kahn, professor of journalism at the
University of Southern California, said, “My attention span has been
condensed. It’s more difficult to concentrate for long stretches. There
is less face-to-face interaction in the home. It’s not good.”

Dana
Chisnell, co-director of the Center for Civic Design, wrote, “Being
online all the time is stressful and distracting. It has come to feel
like I’m performing for the makers of the platform rather than having
real conversations. There are too many channels running concurrently,
and it’s too hard to keep up. I feel unfocused all the time. Until
today, I had three Twitter accounts and a Facebook account and I have
been on about a dozen Slack teams. I find being hyperconnected to be
time-consuming and distracting. I have read less fiction and spent less
time doing personal writing over the last few years. This is largely due
to the time I spend on social media. That time has connected me to
thousands of interesting people, but it hasn’t brought me closer to any
of them. Today, I deactivated one of my Twitter accounts and my Facebook
account. I hadn’t been to Facebook in more than a year, and I hadn’t
missed it. I learned that my tweets were also forwarded to my Facebook
account – a setting I must have made years ago – and that people were
responding to them in Facebook. So, to them, it felt like I was present.
But I was basically a Facebook bot. So, rather than continue to be rude
by not participating in the conversation there, I deactivated the
account. By closing the accounts and limiting my time on the internet,
especially with social media, I’m hoping for a more productive life and
to have closer, more-focused relationships with close friends and
family.”

Vicki Davis, an IT director, teacher and podcaster
based in North America, said, “My life is more fulfilling since I have
fought a battle with internet addiction and won. I have blogged since
2005 and been on Twitter from the early years of the service. My
children have grown up with a mom who struggled with internet addiction
for many years. There were times I might be busier tweeting than
watching the kids make sugar cookies at Christmas. After four or five
years, I got a wake-up call. It happened when I saw a woman who was at
school helping her son try to fly a kite at the kindergarten ‘fly a
kite’ day. The mom had a 5-year-old looking at her, begging, ‘Mom help
me fly,’ and the mom had her cellphone in one hand talking to someone
about flying the kite as she tried to help her son fly the kite with the
other hand. The kite wouldn’t fly. Simply put, the kite wouldn’t fly
without her total attention to her son. And as I watched, I saw myself. I
saw my own failures. My children needed my complete attention so they
could fly. So, that summer, I talked to my husband Kip. I scheduled the
tweets for the next two weeks in Buffer and gave Kip my phone for two
weeks. I went cold turkey on all social media. At first, it was shocking
because I thought of my phone constantly and all those people ‘out
there.’ But over the days, I found myself coming back to a healthy
center. Since that time, I put down my phone every Sunday. My phone has
no place at meal times. When we go on vacation, I will put my phone in
‘airplane’ mode all the time so I can just use it as a camera. I wrote
about some of this on a blog post on Edutopia titled ‘Put the cell phone
down and be there.’ I used to believe the lie that multitasking is
possible. It isn’t. I live life with more intentionality and find myself
far more productive than I could have ever dreamed. Instead of getting
on social media 20 times a day, I check it once or twice a day and now
have a five-day-a-week podcast for educators, blog, speak, joined the
choir at church and live life deeper. And as a woman with over 150,000
Twitter followers, it would be easy to live a shallow life full of
shallow relationships. But instead I now go deep and am a much happier
person. My kids need my full attention to fly. Social media and my
smartphone have a place, but not everyplace. I am a human being and not
just a human doing. I turn off just about every notification and I
jealously guard against interruptions like spam and silly apps that beg
for my attention. My attention is finite, and the choices I make about
how to spend it are strategic. I take this passion along to help
students and teachers understand it but I often feel like it is a losing
battle. I see a basketball player brag about Snapchat streaks and
wonder what would happen to their game if they did free throws with the
same intentionality.”

Anita Salem, a human systems researcher
based in North America, commented, “I have email, a smart home, a smart
hone and an Apple Watch. When I have a question, I look it up. When I
can’t think of the name of a song, I don’t search my memory, I ask
Alexa. When I’m lonely, I check Facebook or text a friend. When I take a
walk, I’m being told by my calendar that I had better hurry, I’m told
by an app that I’m walking too slow and I get a text that gets me
thinking about tomorrow. When I’m waiting in line, idling at a stop
light, or waiting for a friend, I read texts or the news or a book on my
small screen. What do I miss? Discussing questions and figuring things
out with a friend. Racking my brain to remember and being satisfied when
I do. Getting up off my butt to see or talk to a friend. Walking and
listening to the birds and watching my dog pick just the right spot to
pee. Stopping and enjoying the pause, the white space in-between, the
wide-open space where the world lives.”

David S. H. Rosenthal,
retired chief scientist of the LOCKSS Program at Stanford University,
said, “‘Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it’ –
George Santayana. Society’s memory has moved from paper, a durable
medium, to the Web, an evanescent medium. I have spent the last two
decades working to build tools and organizations to make the Web less
evanescent. My efforts, and those of others in the field, are
increasingly failing to measure up to the task. See my keynote at the
year’s Pacific Neighborhood Consortium:
http://blog.dshr.org/2017/11/keynote-at-pacific-neighborhood.html”

Meredith
P. Goins, a group manager at Oak Ridge Associated Universities (ORAU),
wrote, “My 15-year-old son loves chatting with his friends at night
after dinner via a game, but he would get so sucked into the
conversation, he would look up and see that it was three hours later and
hadn’t done his homework. He has no impulse control. He is impatient –
it must load now! – and he doesn’t have strong in-person communication
skills, as with many, or so I believe. Kids are great at talking in
small groups or via text or via gaming, but are horrible at doing it in a
professional setting. For example, my son, and some other kids, have
preferred to take a C on a paper instead of an A because they would not
stand and present their findings.”

An anonymous respondent said,
“The opportunities for distraction afforded by my heavily
digitally-mediated lifestyle makes it harder for me to do both the
things I want to do and the things I should be doing in at least two
ways: I have a much harder time sitting still and doing nothing than I
used to, and I also have a much harder time sitting still and doing ONE
thing than I used to. I usually find I’m happiest when I am doing one,
and only one, thing for an extended period of time. And when I give
myself permission to sit still and do nothing for a while, I often find
that I naturally transition into doing ONE thing that I really want to
do, or remember the ONE thing that I really should be doing right now.”

A
professor wrote, “A negative anecdote: Years from now, filmmakers may
portray people hunched over their phones the way they today portray
people from an earlier era hunched over their cigarettes. I recently ate
at a very high-end restaurant to celebrate a special occasion and the
people next to us spent the entire evening photographing their food to
post it on Instagram, texting people and looking things up online. One
of the individuals had her phone in her hand the entire time. I find
similar behavior among many. Mid-conversation at parties I’ve seen
people pick up their phones and turn away from others around them. I
have seen people sitting with each other in restaurants or cafes and
staring at their phones rather than talking to each other, and parents
ignoring their kids in favor of doodling on their phones (including at
beaches, swimming pools, etc.).”

A head of research and
instruction at a major U.S. university wrote, “While I’m
better-connected to friends and affinity communities in distant
locations as an information professional, turning off the flow of
content at home in the evenings to focus on my family is a strain in
several ways. It limits how much professional and civic reading gets
done, it forces the need to create boundaries (for one’s own good) that
have been blurred, it raises almost-involuntary questions about what
kinds of conversations your partner or friends are having without you or
even with you nearby. Without intervention, it’s easy to experience
strong affective responses that often don’t get interrogated in helpful
ways.”

Erin Valentine, a writer based in North America, wrote,
“A simple example of technology affecting well-being is when you’re at
the dinner table with your family. Growing up 10 to 15 years ago, there
was no distraction from the conversation over the meal. Now phones are
on the table and in people’s hands. The conversation can be stunted or
just lost due to phones being so easily accessible.”

Melissa
Rach, a content consultant based in North America, commented, “Although
sometimes you can have real, human interactions on social media, these
channels … masquerade as human interactions, but are really competitions
of worth. I have been an internet consultant for 20-plus years and I
worked on internet projects before that. For me, digital technology has
been a fairly rewarding career. My daily life and digital technology are
completely intertwined. But honestly, some days I wish they weren’t. I
waste so much time watching videos, reading articles and learning trivia
that I would have never ‘needed’ to know before the internet. And I
spend less time doing things that make a difference. … Before the
internet, I used to make lists of things I wanted to look up when I went
to the library and only the really important things made the list. Now,
I know a lot about many things that are unimportant. More to your
point: When I got my first email account in the early 1990s, one of the
first things I did was locate a pen pal from Spain I had exchanges with
when I was a child. We started emailing every day and then instant
messaging. We became really great friends over the digital space.
Instead of just getting a letter once a month, we got to know each
other’s daily lives. Eventually we met in person. We’re still friends
today. I will see her in March. That was the really good side of the
internet. However, once social media started and you could find all your
long-lost friends (and acquaintances) on Facebook or Twitter, things
changed. We figure out what to post based on what will get likes and
retweets. It’s about what builds audiences, not what builds
relationships. I think back to the 1980s, when my tween self had pen
pals all over the world. I would sit down and carefully think about what
to write on those expensive airmail sheets. Each person got personal
attention, not a form letter, because we didn’t have an option. It might
have been communicating with people far away, but it was a really
different kind of communication. My high school friends, college friends
and I often say things like, ‘Thank goodness the internet didn’t exist
then.’ Most youthful shenanigans should be left to memories of the
people involved, not the people who watched a performance on YouTube.
Failing on YouTube makes you a social pariah. Failing with your friends
makes for a good story to laugh about later.”

An anonymous
respondent said, “Tech has potential to do great good. I am a
genealogist and I use it to help unite families. But the other side is
that it is too easy not to selectively help but to be drawn into an
artificial world. Facebook and Twitter are addictive, and both aim at
showing you only what they think you want to see (since that is how they
make money).”

A professor of political science at a major U.S.
university said, “With a smartphone near my bed and the parental
responsibility to keep abreast of what my teenage children are doing
with smartphones, I read far fewer books in the evening. I am more
connected to the social media outrage of the day, less in tune with art
and culture.”

I am bombarded with news through a number of
apps that are constantly sending notifications. As a consequence, I find
myself worried about many political issues simultaneously and often
distractingly.Anonymous Respondent

An anonymous respondent
commented, “I am bombarded with news through a number of apps that are
constantly sending notifications. As a consequence, I find myself
worried about many political issues simultaneously and often
distractingly.”

A professor of computer science at a major U.S.
university wrote, “I am a college professor and have seen the
performance of my students degrade over the last seven years in terms of
hours required to complete the same, essentially, take-home exam. The
average time has gone up from 8 hours to 11 without improvement of their
final grade range. They do not get better grades while they spend more
time.”

An anonymous respondent wrote, “When I was a kid, we did
not have cellphones. I played with my friends for hours and my parents
were fine (I think). Today parents have the technology to track their
kids and contact their kids any time they want, which gives kids today a
much shorter leash to be kids. The whole reason there is a childhood is
to learn how to be your own person and with today’s helicopter parents,
it’s really hard to learn to be your own person.”

A pre-law
student based in the United States said, “When the blog site Tumblr was
super popular, I would stay up until around 5 or 6 in the morning in
hopes of seeing everything my ‘dashboard’ had to offer. I had FOMO –
Fear Of Missing Out. There would be several tabs open at the same time
because I would open a new one each time I got back on the site in the
morning; hoping I didn’t miss too much while I was sleeping. I was
definitely operating on information overload; there was way too much
content for me to view, let alone synthesize.”

A college senior
and social media professional wrote, “Today, when I try to sit down and
read a book, I can’t seem to get my brain to calm down and focus. It is
all over the place. I can’t concentrate. I just start thinking about
what I’m going to do next. I hate admitting it, but I know that my
attention span has shortened, making it harder for me to concentrate
whether it’s reading for a class or attempting to read for fun. A few
years ago I loved to read. I would finish a book in one or two days and
start the next one immediately. I preferred reading books over watching
movies. But as I moved into the digital age, as my parents gave me a
cellphone and then a computer, I spent less and less time reading books
and more time online or on my phone. I am now used to spending my time
getting instant answers and skim-reading online, not spending much time
on any one thing. I can search a keyword with a few clicks of the
keyboard. I don’t spend time actually reading and understanding what I
am looking at – even often reading the search engine synopsis of a site
to get my answers instead of actually clicking through to the site.”

A
college student wrote, “I fear that as technology is perfected to be
more addictive and VR and AR advance to envelope everyone that more and
more people will fall into those worlds and not necessarily be able to
return to that which we now consider to be real. While digital life is
good, the downsides are quite troublesome. My brother spent a period
between graduating school and obtaining a job idly watching screens and
interacting only via them. He spent all day and into the night
constantly immersed in this. The TV was always on in the background
while he played intense online video games on his laptop, while also
continuously texting or messaging others about the game. Technology
became his life. It was difficult to separate him from his virtual world
and to interest him in physical human interaction. He became grumpy,
began sleeping less and less, and stopped dedicating time to his own
physical needs. Although it was a scary time, he was later able to pull
himself out of it and eventually reconnect with the real world. While he
was lucky to be able to quit, some are not able to do so.”

Adam
Popescu, a journalist, wrote, “If you’re a writer, a journalist, an
artist, it’s your job to engage with the world, to look under the rocks
of humanity, and most of all, to read. Read books. In print. It’s a
deeper read, without the threat of a distracting tab or a push
notification. Read magazines, read newspapers – a range of them, from
your state and city and even other nations. And read them deeply. Too
few of us do that. ‘Oh, I read plenty,’ you say. If you’re reading based
on what’s trending on Facebook or via a link pulled from Twitter,
that’s not really reading and it’s time we stopped pretending. That’s
feeding at the trough of stupidity. If you’re a writer, a journalist, an
artist: stop being part of the disconnect problem. Stop everything.
First off, read. Set time aside to really do that and do nothing but
that in that period. See if your sleep doesn’t get better, your sex,
too, your everything. It helps you think and slow down. If you’re a busy
editor – ********, whoever you are – read the emails people send you
and respond in a timely manner. This is schoolyard but still true: Treat
others the way you want to be treated. Don’t look down at your phone
during a meeting, a coffee, a dinner, a date. Be there. Wherever you
are. How many photos from your camera roll memorializing your life do
you actually look back on? Look up.”

A professor wrote,
“Facebook is a relentless resource for a bored mind. There is always
something sticky there. It’s the new TV. It is designed to keep you
‘engaged’ and not to offer any obvious work of filtering, even though
its algorithms are busily at work.”

A professor based at a top
university in the U.S. upper Midwest commented, “I have significantly
less time to think or to stay away from work-related issues. Less time
for family.” Family and societal challenges

Giacomo Mazzone,
head of institutional relations at the European Broadcasting Union,
said, “I’ve worked all my life as a journalist and I believed that this
was not a job, but something like a mission. Being a watchdog of
democracy is a very exciting and rewarding sensation. Today the job I
liked and practiced all of my life still exists only in a few ivory
towers that became global (The New York Times, the BBC, some of the
public service broadcasters financed by states …). The small independent
newspaper where I started doesn’t exist anymore and could never return
because their business model doesn’t work. Rather than being considered
the watchdog of democracy now, I’m stigmatized as a ‘mediator’; that
means that I’m blamed and considered a priori as part of the
establishment. Verification of sources and accuracy in reporting seems
to be considered a waste of time and the news of non-existent flying
donkeys (or, for instance, false statements such as ‘Obama is not a
U.S.-born citizen’) get millions of likes thanks to algorithms while the
real news of the donkey walking on the hill doesn’t get any. To
remediate the most evident damages of this, now hundreds of non-skilled
youngsters hungry for (badly paid) jobs are hired and gathered in cold
hangars to ‘take down’ the most damaging ‘news’ in an ‘ex-post’ exercise
with no sense, no future and no accountability to society. If this is
the future of the journalistic career, I will encourage my children not
to get into it.”

Evan Selinger, a professor of philosophy at
Rochester Institute of Technology, wrote, “It’s a bit depressing to look
at the problems of online life through my everyday experiences
interacting with my daughter, who is in middle school. Despite
everything that I know about the problems of continuous partial
attention, corporate surveillance and the idealized personas that are
curated online, I suspect I don’t do enough to address them. I’m not
fully checking my knowledge at the door. And, of course, my intentions
are good. But engineered addiction is more powerful than cautionary
discourse, and social pressures readily tug on heartstrings.”

Jennifer
deWinter, an associate professor of rhetoric and a director of
interactive media and game development, said, “Email. I remember working
as a professor before email and after email. The insidious belief that
we should always be available, always ready to answer questions for
anyone about anything, is one of the most highly detrimental changes
that I have seen. The same can be said about whatever dominant
electronic communication technology a community uses. I think, too,
about raising my two children. And – this will sound ironic?
counterintuitive? – but I teach game development in a well-ranked
university games program while I simultaneously limit my children’s time
on games. My 9-year-old son said it best recently: He told me that when
he plays too many video games, he starts to hate any interruption,
anyone who gets in his way. While this is probably true of anyone in a
flow state of being deeply immersed, games have a way to constantly
provide a well-timed dopamine hit so that the player always craves more.
Research bears this out. I don’t know what to do with this, because I
don’t demonize the technologies of our world. I am constantly watching
and evaluating their impact, nevertheless.”

A professor in media
studies at a Norwegian university commented, “When we are on vacation
in the mountains with no internet or cell coverage, the mood of the
whole family improves. We are more together and present in the moment.”

A
research leader at one of the top-five global technology companies
said, “Digital technology allows us to follow our children’s school
progress in detail. This enables parents to detect signs that a child is
having trouble and administrators to detect signs that a teacher is not
performing effectively. It also increases the stress on children and
teachers who realize they are constantly observed and no longer have the
same opportunities to correct their performance on their own. It pushes
teachers to make every grade nuance explicit, ramping up the stress for
students and parents. Such double-edged swords are common, and we don’t
have any idea how to evaluate the net impact.”

A pre-law
student said, “Anxiety and depression have been on the rise in those
within my generation. I was recently diagnosed with mild depression. I
believe that being hyperconnected within this digital life could be a
root of the issue. I find myself, my mood and thoughts, influenced
tremendously by scrolling mindlessly on social media platforms and by
the content that I come across daily, even hourly. It has become
increasingly hard to not constantly compare the reality of my life with
those reflected though my iPhone screen and – even though I am aware of
the false reality of the profiles I come across – it is hard not to have
my own self-esteem and confidence plummet when I come across a
perfectly tailored life. Netflix and all of the streaming sites have
proven to be hazardous for my productivity, as I have become
effortlessly addicted to them as a means of distraction and
procrastination. I also see this constant hyperconnectedness impacting
my friends. It worries me, truly does, to see the impact it is having on
my family, as my parents are constantly struggling to catch up to the
newest innovation that impacts their daily lives, and my little sister
has seemingly found life behind a screen. She has adapted so quickly to
life with an iPhone that she does not even remember ever playing with
the traditional toys she once enjoyed.”

An anonymous respondent
wrote, “Recently I participated in a family reunion attended by a
2-year-old child. When the child’s behaviour became too disruptive of
adult conversation, she was given a tablet and shown the movie Frozen.
The child became mesmerized and non-verbal, almost in a trance-like
state. I compare this to when my children were young and were
entertained by non-digital distractions – human contact, arts and
crafts, a story – and I wonder what the impact of this very early
digital exposure will be. Engagement with technology is starting very
young, and we don’t really know what the impact will be.”

An
anonymous respondent said, “I recently did some research into the
digital lives of parents and teens in Japan to mirror research that was
done in the U.S. It is very clear that when you compare these two
cultures there is more similarity than difference in the ways digital
technology is reshaping our most intimate relationships. In many of the
families we heard from, mobile devices and the content on them is a
source of anxiety, conflict and concern. Parents are struggling with
their own use and overuse of these devices as they are monitoring the
use in their children, creating a new parenting challenge. One of the
most alarming bits of data from this study was the number of teens who
reported that they sometimes felt their cellphone was more important to
their parents than they were – 20%. This is just not a message we want
to send our children.”

A North American professor wrote, “There
is almost no one with whom I regularly interact solely face to face. I
spend an inordinate amount of time with digital technology. I
communicate via email, use the internet in my research and teaching, use
social media for teaching, read the news online and shop online.”

An
executive for a major internet business wrote, “The easy availability
of information makes it so much easier for me and my kids to, say, look
at a dictionary to gain a basic understanding of a topic. This is why
Wikipedia is so useful. But the profusion of digitally enabled
entertainment – movies, YouTube, streaming music, video games, and so on
– has not, on balance, been good for my kids. They insist on being
glued to their screens, and much of what they consume is, in the words
of Newton Minnow (talking about TV in the early 1960s) a ‘vast
wasteland.’ Like nearly every medium, like radio and TV, the internet
was supposed to herald an era of great information access, which would
enable better democratic participation. Instead, it’s become – in many
corners – a cesspool, with nearly zero information value. This is not
true of the whole Net. But now that Net neutrality is on the way out,
the internet fast lane will be devoted to dreck, not to socially useful
information.”

Jason Abbott, professor of political science at
the University of Louisville, said, “My children are increasingly
incapable of spending quiet time alone, appear more bored and easily
distracted from tasks. As an adult I find there is a growing pressure to
always be available online and to respond immediately to messages and
requests.”

Gail Brown, an instructional designer in Australia,
wrote, “A young person I know began cutting himself when an online
relationship with a girl suddenly ended. This was a person he had never
even met, nor did he really know that anything she posted was real or
truthful. Yes, lies can happen in the real world, but such lies are much
more difficult to continue than those that are shared online.”

I
see all around me how people’s self-esteem is now wrapped up with their
online social activity. This is very problematic for our inner, ethical
lives.Fay Niker

Fay Niker, postdoctoral fellow at Stanford
University’s Center for Ethics in Society, wrote, “I see all around me
how people’s self-esteem is now wrapped up with their online social
activity. This is very problematic for our inner, ethical lives.”

Paul
Manning, a manager, commented, “I have seen one of my children walk
away from a difficult interaction rather than work it out. She did so
quietly and without the other person being aware until it was too late.
Another one of my children cannot live without her cellphone because,
she says, ‘I can have six to eight conversations at the same time.’ This
same child cannot stand when there is silence or she lacks the ability
to interact in a large crowd. She cannot focus on one person at a time
or participate in a group conversation that requires listening. While
digital life has positive benefits, due to the immediate exchanges of
information and the short length of the exchanges, sometimes critical
information is assumed.”

Tanja Cupples Meece, a homeschool
educator based in North America, wrote, “I am a student and an educator
as well as a freelance writer. I teach online courses and spend more
time checking to see if I am doing the teaching properly, rather than
actually teaching. It is also a family problem, my husband also spends a
great deal of time on his phone, and if both of us are on our phones,
our grandson acts out. He isn’t getting the best of us.”

A
professor at a college in North America commented, “I have an
11-year-old child who is pulled into technology in ways that can be
beneficial but it is also shaping his childhood in ways that are
concerning. I am concerned about this new generation’s capacities to
balance technology activities when they are so ever-present.”

A
research scientist said, “One of the most palpable changes is how much
digital technology has changed the dating landscape and our approach to
relationships – especially for those of us who are younger (I’m in my
late 20s). We’ve spent most of our romantic lives with online dating at
least being an option. Just as having the constant stimulation of social
media available makes it harder to commit to something like reading a
book, the constant availability of new partners lowers the threshold for
starting something new, which makes people less inclined to stick
through the hard parts and build something lasting with a partner. It
makes our dating more conservative also – we read through each other’s
profiles thinking we’re selecting better matches, but in taking the
element of chance out of the equation we miss out on the opportunity to
date people different from ourselves who could potentially be very good
for us, whom we might have unexpected chemistry with, etc.”

An
anonymous respondent commented, “I’ve grown weary of the oversharing
that occurs on social media. When people break up, get engaged, have
children, etc., seeing the photos and status changes can be overwhelming
and disheartening when you’re in a certain emotional state and don’t
want to take it all in.” Toxic social media

John Markoff, a
fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at
Stanford University and longtime technology writer at The New York
Times, said, “Reading Twitter at times makes me almost clinically
depressed. I have done what I can to try to break the habit with only
marginal success to date. Frequently it feels like I am drinking from a
fire hose of polluted water.”

Jillian C. York, director for
international freedom of expression at the Electronic Frontier
Foundation, said, “Digital technology has greatly enhanced my life over
the past decade. Just over 10 years ago, I was living abroad for the
first time and began to use blogging and nascent social media platforms
as a way to connect with my friends and family back home. This led to
surprising connections with individuals all over the world and
friendships that last to this day. I don’t have enough fingers and toes
to account for all of the friends I’ve made – and later met ‘in real
life’ – through social media, nor the career and other opportunities
that have unfolded for me through these mediums. My life, my career,
wouldn’t have been possible before the age of digital connectivity. All
good things must come to an end, however, and those social media
environments that once led to beautiful opportunities and friendships
have now become toxic. In spaces where I was once likely to receive
positive feedback, I now face threats and harassment on a daily basis.
I’m still unsure whether it’s us, or the architecture of these spaces,
or perhaps, that they’re simply not scalable.”

Raymond Hogler, a
professor of management at Colorado State University, wrote, “People
consume content that is self-selected, ideologically conformist and
socially reinforcing. That trend will continue. I’ve observed, along
with many other people, that the ubiquitous cellphone is displacing
social interaction. As a teacher, I see students fixated on their phones
in public areas, classrooms and study rooms. I think this phenomenon is
tremendously isolating and divisive.”

Rosanna Guadagno, a
social psychologist with expertise in social influence, persuasion and
digital communication and a researcher at the Peace Innovation Lab at
Stanford University, wrote, “During the 2016 presidential election, I
ended up losing many friends on social media because of all the
divisiveness caused by the spread of misinformation through fake news
from fringe news sources and Russian interference. In particular, I
recall pasting a link from The New York Times on Facebook. The article
ranked the candidates on honesty. Unsurprisingly, Hillary Clinton was
the most honest and Donald Trump was the least honest. Some of my
Republican friends thought this was a joke and laughed in response to
it. This caused a pretty nasty fight between some of my academic friends
and the people who laughed, and I had to shut the conversation down. I
ended up unfriending a couple of my Republican friends. It made me sad,
distressed and confused, and my Facebook use never returned to pre-2016
levels because these things kept happening. Since then, I’ve made a
concerted effort to connect with people using non-text-based options
(such as phone calls and face-to-face visits).”

Peter Levine,
associate dean of Tisch College at Tufts University, said, “I have
shifted from reading news stories about a wide range of topics in a
small number of publications to obsessively following a few breaking
stories on many media platforms, most of which basically repeat the same
information. This shift heightens my anxiety, limits my learning and
wastes time. Although it’s my own fault, the new digital media landscape
enables it.”

Steven Polunsky, a research scientist at Texas
A&M University, wrote, “My high school reunion was held as we
approached the 2016 elections and was almost canceled due to high
emotions and anger, fed by internet misinformation combined with an
organized effort to sow mistrust of institutions like the press, police
and the judiciary.”

Brittany Smith, a digital marketing
consultant based in North America, said, “Overall, social media now
takes away from my sense of well-being, and I try to limit my exposure
to it. As a professional digital marketer this has been a hard
realization to come to. Initially, platforms such as Facebook helped me
stay in touch with the people I care about. As more and more people
joined Facebook and the algorithm changed I found that I was seeing less
and less from them. Facebook was filled with updates from people who
weren’t close to me, and because of our tendency to share happy things
that make us look good, I would come away feeling negative about my
life.”

Flynn Ross, associate professor of teacher education at
the University of Southern Maine, wrote, “As the mother of two
adolescent girls, I confront on a daily basis the potential for social
media to help my daughters be informed global citizens who have access
to [all] sorts of first-hand perspectives, as well as their safety in
terms of who has access to what information about them including their
images and how their online profiles can be used in their futures.”

A
professor at a major state university in the United States who said
digital life will be mostly harmful in the next decade wrote, “The best
example of impact on digital life I can think of is the ongoing effects
of the 2016 U.S. presidential election and the role social media
apparently played in determining its outcome.”

A writer/editor
based in North America, wrote, “For me, the internet has gone from being
a place where I could be myself, to a place where I must carefully
analyze every bit of behavior. There is also a lot I do online that I
would rather not do. I hate Facebook, but I have to stay a member to
keep up with events in many of my friends’ and family’s lives. I have to
use LinkedIn for work, but I deal with a stalker, who greatly
appreciates all that information (which I must keep public, if I’m to
expect any potential clients to take me seriously). What was fun is now
stressful.”

A general manager commented, “A member of my family
who is in her early 60s has seen her general contentment with life
decline as her consumption of social media has risen. In the past, her
mornings, for example, meant reading the newspaper and listening to the
radio. Even when the news was bad, she nonetheless was generally hopeful
and optimistic. Now, she checks her Facebook, Twitter and Instagram
while still in bed and by the time she comes downstairs in the morning,
her mood for the day is already defined. More often than not, that mood
is a negative one (anger, anxiety, fear, stress, pessimism, etc.) than a
positive one. While this family member recognizes that her now
hyperconnected life is bad for her, she has been unable to moderate her
digital consumption throughout the day. This is now having a negative
impact on her relationships with other family members.”

An
anonymous respondent said, “My internet service provider throttles many
websites and interjects ads into others. And this was before the end of
net neutrality. While it is easier to contact friends and family, most
social media sites seem to be fragmenting civil society by creating
information and entertainment bubbles for like-minded people. Uber is
convenient but it doesn’t provide a living wage for drivers.”

A
cybersecurity entrepreneur, coach and investor wrote, “There appears to
be an increasing population of people who mistake social media presence
with professional achievement. This is confusing to new entrants into
the industry. Simultaneously, there seem to be increasingly prevalent
moral panics. These are often followed by fervent attempts to
demonstrate one’s alignment, in the hopes of either gaining favor or
avoiding opprobrium for being insufficiently ‘aware.’ People attempting
to remain on task in professional contexts risk censure if they aren’t
visibly participating in the cause of the day.”

An anonymous
respondent commented, “Three and a half years ago there was a school
shooting at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Seven people
were killed, including the shooter Elliot Rodger. Within a day,
reporters found a chilling YouTube video where Rodger vowed
‘retribution’ for a lifetime of sexual rejection. My social network was
full of posts about this video and the need for gun control. I
understand the outrage – it’s certainly justified – but it felt like
there was no room for anyone to express any other feelings on social
media. And I needed to express other feelings. I had taught some UCSB
students the prior year. After I saw there was a shooting I had no idea
if some of my favorite former students were dead. Either way I had to
deal with the shock that my students could be shot and killed around
campus. When I talked to my family or my friends outside of social
media, they were able to show empathy for what I was feeling. That’s a
credit to my family and friends, but also says something about how
people share feelings on social networking sites. When I tried to reach
out and share my experience on Facebook, I was judged for not
immediately leaping to outrage. I could sense such a profound lack of
empathy that I logged off for a few days. This seems to be a common
pattern after traumatic events. People who want to share their outrage
leap to social media to get things off their chest, blocking out anyone
who needs a more empathetic back-and-forth to deal with the trauma.”
An anonymous respondent commented, “My half sister – in her early 30s –
abandoned Facebook having found it made her miserable and envious. Her
well-being has improved dramatically.”

The adults in my life
are also hyperconnected and are on their devices right before sleep and
upon waking up. The decrease of human interaction is evident.Anonymous
respondent

An anonymous respondent wrote, “Slices of digital
life: Waiting for people to finish tapping on devices before or during a
conversation. A relative explaining how the Boston Marathon bombing was
a hoax and citing online posts as support. Tinder. The fact that
nothing happened after [the] Occupy Wall Street demonstration. In Egypt,
[the Arab Spring] demonstrations led to replacing one dictator with
another.”

An associate professor at a U.S. university said,
“Family members, especially children, are addicted to their devices. In
some cases, the lack of social skills is evident. The adults in my life
are also hyperconnected and are on their devices right before sleep and
upon waking up. The decrease of human interaction is evident. I try to
stay as disconnected as possible. I am much happier when I am not on
Facebook. When I do check it (it is handy for keeping up with people) I
am compelled to continue to look through it, and I spend too much time
on it.”

An anonymous respondent said, “Digital tech has made it
infinitely easier to shop and pay bills, but it has NOT addressed
protection of American security from foreign ‘meddling’ (Russia, et
al.), and it has not addressed protection of individuals from hacking
and similar mispursuits.” A retired public opinion researcher wrote,
“I have cancelled my Facebook page because uninvited and socially
untested information, opinions and behaviors had the potential to
influence my own political (as in polis) social contracts.” Never-ending work with new demands and expectations

Lori
Laurent Smith, an entrepreneur based in North America, commented, “The
promise of digital technology was to make our lives easier, freeing our
time to do the things we wanted to do. My reality has been the opposite.
There is so much more than I ever imagined that I still want to learn,
research and do. Also I spend a ridiculous amount of time learning how
to set up a blog, upgrade memory in a laptop, take better pictures,
write meaningfully in 140 characters, learning how to use new apps,
writing comments and feedback, and reading millions of pages of content.
I was spending a disproportionate amount of time using the internet and
interacting with people online more than I did with my husband,
daughters and friends in real life. As this realization has slowly
dawned on me in recent years, I’ve set timers to limit my time online
when my family is around and when anyone needs me, I immediately shut
down what I was doing online to give them my full attention. I turn off
my phone regularly when I’m hanging out with my friends and family in
real life (which annoys people trying to get in touch but it’s my
life).”

Annette Markham, professor of information studies and
digital design at Aarhus University in Denmark, said, “I exemplify the
hyperconnectivity of knowledge workers. At this stage of my career,
where I network internationally with colleagues, work with dozens of
students at a time, and administer multiple projects and people, I
simply cannot be disconnected. I feel this emotionally and bodily every
single day. My wrists hurt frequently from ongoing carpel tunnel
syndrome; I suffer from chronic back pain that we colloquially call
‘academic back.’ I feel increasing pressure – as well as a lure – to
build my international reputation as a social and digital media expert
through intensive connectivity, continuous publishing and strategic
self-branding on multiple platforms. I feel like this is an
all-or-nothing situation. Sometimes I just feel exhausted. Other times, I
feel like one of thousands of ants trapped in a barrel filling up with
water and we’re all clambering on top of others to keep from drowning.
In the early 2000s, I could ask my media students to disconnect for one
week. Around 2012, I could get them to disconnect for 48 hours. Now,
maybe one in 20 will be able to disconnect for 24 hours. As more
services enter the electronic-only sphere, people are required to be
connected, to know how to access and use these services effectively. It
means being online. Those of us who have been obsessively online for 20
years may be accustomed to an always-on lifestyle and have learned how
to live with it. But knowing how to deal with hyperconnectivity is not
the same as being unaffected by it. We – and by that, I mean myself and
many of my friends and colleagues in the knowledge or tech industry –
pay a heavy price. Sustained stress leads to chronic health issues.
Continuous exposure to millions of people personally reacting to crisis
after crisis on Twitter leaves many of us feeling sad, angry and
hopeless. But we seem unable to stop checking our newsfeeds. The
negative energy feeds on itself. After the U.S. presidential elections
in 2016, almost all of my colleagues showed classic signs of depression.
Worse, we no longer find it surprising to feel sad, angry and
depressed. We may not be immured to the violence this constant exposure
does to our bodies, minds and souls, but we don’t fight it either. I
could say more, but you get the point.”

Douglas Rushkoff, a
professor of media at City University of New York, said, “Right now, I’m
interested in the mental health crises being experienced by the young
men who took BJ Fogg’s captology classes, implemented the strategies at
Facebook and Snapchat and are now realizing how much mental,
psychological and social destruction they have caused.”

Paul
Rozin, a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania,
said, “I’m not sure that email is such a great thing. One colleague
doesn’t use email and seems to be extremely productive. I spend half the
day on it. Much of that half would have been spent on productive
thinking or teaching in the old days.”

The biggest change to
daily life is the difficulty in having a solid block of uninterrupted
time in one’s day to think… Even if I am not looking at my email or my
phone, I know they are there and it is distracting.Thad Hall

Thad
Hall, research scientist and co-author of the forthcoming book
“Politics for a Connected American Public,” wrote, “The biggest change
to daily life is the difficulty in having a solid block of uninterrupted
time in one’s day to think. When communications were primarily by phone
or mail – or even when Wi-Fi/smartphones were not ubiquitous and it was
easy to get away with a laptop without being constantly connected – it
was possible to separate yourself from the digital world. Even writing
this, I am aware of my phone next to me and that my email alerts are on,
and it is hard to avoid being mentally distracted. Even if I am not
looking at my email or my phone, I know they are there and it is
distracting.”

Meg Mott, a professor of politics at Marlboro
College, said, “Early in my teaching career, I thought that teachers
should be judged by their response time to emails. Perhaps this was my
way of proving myself worthy of joining an esteemed faculty. I may not
have read Plato’s ‘Republic’ in the original, but I could check my email
on an hourly basis. At a certain point I realized that speed was
working against me. My replies may have been prompt but the tone was
unmistakably crabby. This was particularly true during times when I was
trying to carve out time to work on my own research. It took a rather
dramatic change in my lifestyle to unhook myself from my 24-hour inbox.
Suffice it to say that a yurt and an outhouse were involved. The effect
on my stress level was immediate. In order to check my email I had to be
in my office during a time when I was not teaching. Not surprisingly,
even though I was less available to my students, the teaching
relationship greatly improved.”

An associate professor at a
major university in the U.S. Midwest said, “The divide between work and
life, and the time I spend not connected, is increasingly non-existent.
My phone and computer are always by my side. I might be working from
home to my office with only a 15-minute gap in between. During that gap,
I often check email when at a red light. Even if I bike, I am listening
to something streaming on my phone. I have communicated via email with
my spouse. I have also texted my children to come to dinner in order to
easily get their attention. I am hyperconnected and always responding to
the first thing rather than looking around me or making decisions that
take time and thought. I have back problems and posture-alignment
problems as a result of extended time in front of a multitude of
screens.”

A research scientist said, “Rather than reading a book
or magazine on my commute, I do things like check Facebook and look at
emails that I can’t easily respond to. Rather than arriving at work
refreshed or arriving home with some space from work, it all comes with
me.”

A college administrator based in North America said, “In
terms of personal impact, I have developed the habit of taking more work
home, which often negatively impacts family interactions and leads to
home-based stress development. Further, it has reduced the time for
exercise and leisure – all of which can negatively impact physical,
emotional and mental health.”

A co-founder of an institute studying values wrote, “Work is now a 24/7 ordeal.”

A
professor emerita of public policy at a major U.S. private university
said, “I am becoming increasingly aware of the way constant access to
digital forms of communication can be overwhelming. I think I’m
relatively politically/socially aware, but the current (growing)
bombardment of email appeals for political action or donations to
address a multitude of apparently apocalyptic problems may at some point
numb my senses.” Changing norms about speedy responses and engagement

Renee
Dietrich, a retired professor, commented, “The main change is that
people expect a response faster. There is not much time for reflection
or analysis.”

A professor at New York University wrote, “My professorial title should be ‘professor of email.'”

A
North American entrepreneur wrote, “There have been many instances when
I haven’t responded on Facebook in a way that someone felt I should,
resulting in resentment. There have been other times when I’ve been
‘stuck online’ and then late for real-world activities. There have been
lots of times where information presented sounded good and healthy but
upon research turned out to be dangerous advice.”

A CEO of a
publishing house said, “While digital technology has certainly connected
me with old friends and family members, it’s not like we really know
these people. I now have former classmates asking me for money, I also
know things about relatives and their political beliefs that make me
never want to spend time with them. So as much as it brings people
together, it also drives wedges. I’m not proud of the contempt I feel
for some former friends after reading their Facebook posts, but nor can I
deny it.”

A research scientist said, “Checking Facebook has
become a chore, yet I must do this regularly to shore up ties with
friends and family. As a woman, I’m culturally conditioned to do so.” The attention economy and surveillance society

Jeremy
Blackburn, a computing sciences professor who specializes in the study
of the impacts of digital life, wrote, “My children (girls, 2 and 7)
spend significant amounts of time on the internet (probably too much,
but, hey, I practice what I preach). Bottom line: Google and Amazon
probably know more about their preferences than I do, and could probably
influence them in ways that I can’t even fathom. To that end, my eldest
daughter really enjoys one particular YouTube channel, which is
entirely appropriate for her (FGTV), however, she has trouble
recognizing that the channel is a *business.* Thus, she will on occasion
come to us and ask to do one of the absurd things that the channel
operators do. For example: A giant food fight. My daughter simply does
not have the maturity to fully understand that these people are making
their livelihood with their videos, that they are edited in such a way
as to make them entertaining, and that what she sees is not their normal
familial activities. We have spent a lot of time discussing this with
her, but it still pops up on occasion. Perhaps this is an indication
that we are not properly regulating the online content she consumes, but
I suspect that, even though we provide her with a fair amount of
freedom, we are much more stringent than the ‘average’ parents. I
believe that this general idea extends to teens and adults as well. We
are inundated with content that represents a *curated* slice of our
contacts life online. This slice is non-representative of reality, and
can lead to some serious misconceptions about how other people live.
This was much less of an issue before the ubiquity of the Web, and my
gut feeling is that it will grow unabated for quite some time.”

Marcus
Foth, professor of urban informatics at Queensland University of
Technology, wrote, “We need to stop using digital technology for the
blind and undirected acceleration of neoliberal growth expectations and
instead reintroduce a moral compass of compassion and ecological
thinking. While I see the potential of digital technology to do great
things for society, I have strong reservations about how it is used and
adopted in everyday life in pursuit of neoliberal growth trajectories
that are further fueled by the big data analytics craze. Critical
humanities research is urgently needed to influence the technocratic and
engineering driven culture to solve humankind’s problems. In my
personal experience, I lament seeing how great research outcomes are
increasingly being reviewed by bean counters in a quantitative
assessment of research performance that reduces research to numbers:
grant income, Ph.D. completions and number of articles in Q1 journals.
Big data is killing the zest of aspirational researchers who wanted to
change the world for the better and are now just reduced to a row in a
spreadsheet. Speaking of well-being, many just quit.”

If I, a
social scientist, cannot resist this temptation, what is happening to
our children and our children’s children?Deborah Coe

Deborah
Coe, a coordinator of research services based in the U.S., said, “I hate
to admit this, but I spend a ridiculous amount of time on my cellphone,
checking emails, Facebook, Pinterest, the news and playing games, on a
daily basis. And I do it to the point of choosing to not go outdoors on a
beautiful day, or to the point of getting blurry vision and ignoring
the warning signs that I’ve overdone it. Here’s my question: If I, a
social scientist, cannot resist this temptation, what is happening to
our children and our children’s children?”

A professor based in
North America said, “I want to share a short excerpt from Chapter 1 of
Frischmann and Selinger’s ‘Re-Engineering Humanity’ (Cambridge, April
2018): ‘Last year, my first grader came home after school very excited.
‘Dad, I won. I mean, I’ve been picked. I get a new watch.’ ‘That’s
great,’ I said, ‘What happened?’ He quickly rattled off something about
being one of the kids in his class who was selected to wear a new watch
for gym class.

“A day or two later, I received the following
letter in the mail from the school district: ‘Dear Parents/Guardians,
Your child has been selected to be among the first group of students to
participate in an exciting new initiative made possible by our recent
$1.5 million PEP [physical education program] Grant. We have added
activity watches to the K-12 physical education program so that we can
assess how the PEP grant impacts students’ physical activity in [the
school district]. We are periodically selecting groups of students at
random to wear activity watches on their wrists to track daily activity
time. One of the goals of our program is to see that students get the
recommended amount of physical activity each day (60 minutes). As part
of a quality physical education program, the use of activity watches can
motivate students to challenge themselves to become more physically
active. For the students selected to participate in this first group, we
will be distributing activity watches starting Jan. 13 for students to
wear before, during, after school and over the weekend until Tuesday,
Jan. 21. We ask that students do not take off the watch once it’s on
their wrist. They should sleep, even shower with the watch in place.
There are no buttons to push or need to touch the watch, as it is
pre-programmed to record and store each day of activity time. At the end
of the nine days, each family will be able to access a report of their
child’s activity, and you are welcome to consult with your child’s
physical education teacher about what you learn and ways to further
support your child’s physical health and fitness. In addition, the
group’s combined information will be used to provide baseline data on
student physical activity in [the school district]. In closing, I invite
you to join me and your child’s physical education teacher in
motivating your family to participate in physical activity together. If
you should have any questions about this new technology, please do not
hesitate to contact your child’s physical education teacher. Yours in
health, XXXX XXXXXXXX Supervisor of Health, Physical Education and
Nursing Services.’

“When I read the letter, I went ballistic.
Initially, I wondered about various privacy issues: Who, what, where,
when, how and why? With regard to collection, sharing, use and storage
of data about kids. The letter did not even vaguely suggest that parents
and their children could opt out, much less that their consent was
required. Even if it had, it couldn’t be informed consent because there
were so many questions left unanswered. I also wondered whether the
school district had gone through some form of institutional review board
(IRB) process. Had someone, anyone considered the ethical questions? I
read the letter again but got stuck on: ‘We ask that students do not
take off the watch once it’s on their wrist. They should sleep, even
shower with the watch in place.’ Seriously, bath time and bedtime
surveillance! The letter made me think of one of those Nigerian bank
scam emails that go straight into my spam folder. Such trickery! I
thought.

“I remembered how my son had come home so excited. The
smile on his face and joy in his voice were unforgettable. It was worse
than an email scam. They had worked him deeply, getting him hooked. He
was so incredibly happy to have been selected, to be part of this new
fitness program, to be a leader. How could a parent not be equally
excited? Most were, but not me. I contacted someone at the PTA, spoke
with the supervisor of health, wrote a letter to the school district
superintendent, and eventually had some meetings with the general
counsel for the school district.

“The program is like so many
being adopted in school districts across the country – well-intentioned,
aimed at a real problem (obesity), financed in an age of incredibly
limited and still shrinking budgets and elevated by the promise of
efficiency that accompanies new technologies. What caught people’s
attention most was a line from the letter I sent to the superintendent:
‘I have serious concerns about this program and worry that the school
district hasn’t fully considered the implications of implementing a
child-surveillance program like this.’ No one previously had called it
‘child-surveillance.’ All of a sudden, the creepiness of bath time and
bedtime surveillance sunk in. Naturally, this triggered familiar privacy
concerns. The term ‘surveillance’ generated a visceral reaction and was
an effective means for getting people to stop and think.

“Up to
that point, no one seemed to have done so for several obvious reasons.
People trust the school district and love technology. The salient
problem of obesity weighs heavily on the community; activity watches
seem to be a less intrusive means for addressing the problem. People
obtain information about their activity levels and then are better able
to adjust their behaviour and improve fitness. They can do so on their
own, as a family, or in consultation with the physical education
teacher. Plus, it was funded by a federal grant. The activity watch
program presents substantial upside with little or no downside, an easy
cost-benefit analysis. For most people, it seems like one of those rare
win-win scenarios. After my intervention, very little changed; better
disclosure and informed consent apparently would fix everything. These
limited privacy concerns fall woefully short of acknowledging the full
power of techno-social engineering. The 24/7 data collection and the
lack of informed consent are real problems. But the stakes run much
deeper.” Sleep problems and stirred-up woes

Larry Rosen, a
professor emeritus of psychology at California State University,
Dominguez Hills known as an international expert on the psychology of
technology, wrote, “Since publishing a journal article on the impact of
technology on sleep, I have made a conscious effort to silence my phone
one hour prior to bedtime, and it has improved my sleep and alertness
during the day.”

Time previously spent dealing with boredom –
day dreaming, contemplating, etc. – is now spent tethered to one’s
phone, which is not relaxing and eventually makes my thumbs hurt.A North
American professor

An attorney based in North America wrote,
“There is a loss of, and interruption of sleep. There are conflicts over
failure to respond in what is now seen to be a ‘timely’ fashion. There
is increasing personal impatience. The effects are especially strong on
teenagers.”

A communications professional based in North America said, “My sleep patterns have been negatively impacted.”

A
North American professor wrote, “Time previously spent dealing with
boredom – day dreaming, contemplating, etc. – is now spent tethered to
one’s phone, which is not relaxing and eventually makes my thumbs hurt.”
General concerns and complaints

Yasmin Ibrahim, an
associate professor of international business and communications at
Queen Mary University of London, said, “The problem is as digital
technologies become seamlessly part of our everyday engagement and mode
of living – we may not question our actions or decisions we make online.
Making the internet a healthy space means analysing our modes of being
and everyday engagements in the digital realm and this itself can be
stressful. But keeping the internet a space of ideals requires us to do
precisely that; to question every action and think about the internet
architecture and how our activities are connected to a wider digital
ecology of producing and consuming.”

Riel Miller, team leader of
futures literacy at UNESCO, said, “Digital life should be pull not
push. Demand-driven. What it hasn’t yet been able to deliver on is the
capacity to know why, when and how to pull. Without the curiosity engine
configured for pull’s life of surprise we suffer under the regime of
push’s desperate need for certainty, diminishing what the Net can
deliver, even if it allows much more spontaneity.”

Mike Caprio,
innovation consultant for Brainewave Consulting, said, “I have
consciously made choices to limit the intrusion of my digital life into
my real life. I no longer carry a smartphone, I only occasionally carry a
flip phone when I know I am going to need to be reached or make calls. I
only allow notifications from computers or tablets to interrupt me
during work hours. I deleted my Facebook account in 2013. While this has
reduced the number of interactions with friends, family and colleagues,
I feel much more connected to my life and in my relationships.”

Scott
Johns, a high school teacher, commented, “Just yesterday, I had been to
a secondhand book store to get some specific texts (a job-related task)
and as a joke bought a couple of old fiction books. Then there was a
period of time when I was in my car waiting for my wife to finish a
meeting and I thought I’d have a read. They weren’t great books so I
expected to have a bit of a laugh at them. The written words on those
old pages captured my mind in a way that was unexpected. My mind was
soon lit up with imagery and I went into a deep state of contemplation
of not only the story but the skill of the writer. I realized that there
was nothing else to the book, it had its story and no more, so I was
able to let go of the need for there to be more happening. Had the story
been available online, firstly, I would not have chosen it above the
proliferation of options and demands presented by the computer as
vehicle for the internet. Secondly, had I started the story, my mind
would not have wandered within the story but to the many other things
the computer could have provided me at that moment. I would have engaged
thinly with the story with the result that little trace of it would
have remained in my neurology. The cute and clever choices of words made
by the writer would have vanished by breakfast time. No enhancement of
my mind would have occurred. It would have been a strangely empty task.
But this morning I have the very unfamiliar desire to read fiction
books.”

Laurie L. Putnam, an educator, librarian and
communications consultant, wrote, “Anecdote #1 Digital technologies let
us be more present in the lives of distant family and friends. My family
is spread around the region, close enough to get together often, but
far enough apart to make in-person visits an effort that requires
significant travel time. Yet, despite the distance, I look after my
elderly mother and keep in close touch with my 12-year-old nieces. Every
day we depend on email, texting, document sharing and web-based medical
systems. From 150 miles away I can order medications for my mother and
communicate with her doctors online. I can help my nieces with their
homework online, in real time, and we can share daily life in pictures,
text, and video. Our days and lives would be very different without the
internet. Anecdote #2 My shiny new washing machine blinked at me with a
high-tech LED readout that offered more choices than ever for cleaning
my clothes. Cool. But those lights went out a few years later, just
after the warranty expired. A service technician diagnosed the death of
the circuit board and ordered a replacement – cheaper than a new washer,
he said. The new board arrived, but it didn’t work either, the fault of
another faulty chip. ‘That happens. It’s not unusual,’ said the
technician who next recommended discarding the entire 300-pound washing
machine and buying a new one. The experience was frustrating,
inconvenient and expensive. Did the digital washing machine clean my
clothes better? Sometimes. I liked and used about 20% of the options.
But overall I had been perfectly happy with my old analog washer. Was
the digital washer more expensive? Yes. Did it break faster? Yes. Was it
fixable when it broke? No. Recyclable? Unknown. Chips have relatively
short life cycles, and if we don’t want our children to inherit
landfills of disposable appliances, we need to design more reliable
products that can be serviced and recycled. Did the digital machine
raise my stress level? Yes. Overall, did the digital washer improve my
well-being? No. And it wasn’t even connected to the Internet of Things,
surreptitiously collecting data about my lost socks and water usage.
Just because we can make everything digital doesn’t mean we should.
There are cases where our well-being is better served by simpler, analog
tools.”

Frank Odasz, president of Lone Eagle Consulting,
commented, “I started online in 1983 with two big personal goals: 1) To
learn how to live and work solo from anywhere. Now I am celebrating my
20th year as president of Lone Eagle Consulting, primarily creating and
delivering unique online courses for citizens and educators,
specializing in rural, remote and indigenous internet learning. I’ve
done over a million miles, presenting prolifically. 2) To understand,
truly, what’s the best that good people can learn to do for themselves
and others online. Being online at 300 baud back in 1983 has now evolved
to having 7 MB fixed wireless at a rural ranch house in Montana. I’ve
been able to dramatically enhance my ability to absorb lots of
information routinely and to synthesize my learnings in articles, live
presentations and unique online courses. But, the shelf life of such
knowledge keeps shortening due to our age of accelerating change. The
sheer volume of what I’ve put online is testament to the power of online
self-directed learning. But along the way I taught myself to avoid the
time-wasting tactics of corporations. Believe it or not, my smartphone
hardly ever rings, beeps or otherwise controls my peace of mind. The
ideal rural lifestyle, Goal #1, has been something of an art to achieve
and maintain. This morning, I’m about to write an article on the Code of
the West, linking our moral code to [corporate entities’] snarky,
persuasive algorithms and the 6,000-plus youth suicides annually,
anxiety problems of 1 in 5 screen-agers and more ‘impacts’ that are just
recently making the mainstream news. I’ve presented for APEC
[Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation] twice on indigenous broadband
training best practices and the challenges of positive social
engineering; designing for positive outcomes by a connected human
family. We’re realizing that everyone has the choice for a global voice
and impact. If the remaining 3 billion not online – mostly young, poor
and eager to learn but without schools, teachers or online access – are
suddenly given online access without moral guidance and meaningful
short-term outcomes, then connectivity worldwide with be a lose-lose
instead of a carefully orchestrated win-win. This is the understanding
that I’ve worked to achieve since I came online in 1983 at 300 baud.
Here I find myself, still solo, knowing one in five kids have been
cyberbullied at the high school in Meridian, Idaho, my granddaughter
will attend. Net neutrality and freedom of creativity and speech has
been killed by tech giants; 47% of jobs will disappear by 2025 due to AI
and robotics; and the tech giants are killing competition and startups
instead of seeking the win-win of unleashing the latent creativity in
everyone on the planet. The stupidity of actions by Not My President
[Trump] are against common sense, the love of learning, fairness for all
and American values. But, if too many rural folks are still fooled by
Facebook news on their smartphones, then the worst is yet to come.”

A
professor from North America wrote, “The internet is everything for me,
my family and my students today. We would not and could not do without
it. Period. It is amazing! However, its ever-present influence in the
lives of the hyperconnected also seems to be quite overwhelming – it is
causing stress and anxiety and somewhat lowering the learning
performance in courses for most of my students. I have been teaching at a
fairly exclusive private university for 20 years. These students have
all of the privileges of the most-connected. Over the past decade the
students have been progressively more resistant to reading and writing
assignments that require any sort of deep critical thinking, and I have
had to annually reduce the course expectations as they literally buckle
under what they perceive to be undue ‘pressure’ from simply being asked
to do reading and writing assignments that were absolutely no problem
for students of the first decade of the 2000s and previous.”

A
research scientist based in Europe commented, “I used to hate writing
text messages and only used them in case the other person couldn’t pick
up the phone and I needed to leave an important information. Instead I
called people, whether it was for making an appointment, asking them how
they are, etc. Shortly after I started to use WhatsApp however, I was
dragged into the constant availability and spend so much time on writing
things that could have been discussed more easily on the phone. Because
I receive so many messages, I cannot have my phone on loud when my data
is switched on, which also means I miss phone calls. The fact that less
and less people even recognise when they are being called makes it even
more difficult to switch back to calls instead of messages again.”

Stephanie
Mallak Olson, director at the Iosco-Arenac District Library in
Michigan, wrote, “I am sad that people who are not ‘connected’ to the
digital world are often ignored or left out. If you are not on Facebook
and your family only shares photos via Facebook you never see them. If
you don’t own a computer to get bank statements online you are often
charged a fee to get the statements in hard copy. If you are not on a
device and everyone else around you is then how do you get to be a part
of the conversation? While at conferences, I find it rude that people
are doing other online work instead of giving their attention to a
speaker. Many sources of information are now only available online and
people must rely on others to find the answers. I recently heard a
doctor say to a patient ‘you need to find someone to look it up for you
online.’ People in that same office wouldn’t take the time to assist a
person with their ‘patient portal’ access but instead gave them a Web
address where they could take an online course. I happen to know the
person does not have or know how to operate a computer. I use computers
every day both for work and home. I do not text or even have my cheap
cellphone close by as I want a limit on my time spent on a mobile
device. I also support getting together with family without devices so
we can talk.”

A technology consultant and expert on attention
and workflow previously with a top-five tech company wrote, “It’s been
liberating and enslaving. It takes effort to ignore. We have given it
more power than we’ve given the best parts of our humanity.”

Anthony
Rutkowski, internet pioneer and business leader, said, “Although it has
clearly changed daily life, it is arguably not for the better.”

We
have a running quote in our family that sums it up so well. ‘Do you
remember when you used to have to wonder things?’Tiziana Dearing

Tiziana
Dearing, a professor at the Boston College School of Social Work, said,
“We have a running quote in our family that sums it up so well. ‘Do you
remember when you used to have to wonder things?'”

A research
scientist and internet pioneer commented, “In the small, digital
technology has been a highly positive experience. I work from home
part-time – a wonderful contribution to my well-being – and I keep in
contact with friends too distant to see often. It is in the large – the
societal – where I feel the negative aspects of the digital world have
personal consequences for me, an impact on my well-being. The rise of
hatred, the manipulation of politics and so on – these are not distant
events with no personal impact.”

A professor wrote, “Now when I
wake up in the morning I reach for my iPhone with trepidation to find
out what outrage our so-called ‘president’ has perpetrated already. It’s
horrible.” A senior product strategy expert commented, “I ride
bikes with an older friend in the mountains of bucolic Pennsylvania. The
friend, who had not yet discovered Facebook, Instagram and texting, and
I would go for a ride. I loved that I was disconnected for a few hours.
The last time we rode he was getting alerts through a Garmin mounted on
his handlebars (they were mostly from Facebook – people liking a photo,
etc.). It interrupted both my experience of the bike ride and my
connection to my friend.”

A professor based in Oceania wrote, “I
grew up with pen and inkwells at school and a typewriter at work. Right
from the very beginning it was too complicated and time-consuming for
men to do this type of demeaning, boring work. Over time, typing pools
disappeared, executive assistants appeared and even some brave men would
actually type. Technology improved ‘women’s work’ but not their
prestige or paycheck. My first experience with email occurred while
working for large American actuarial firm. I could send work last thing
during the day (in Australia) and first thing the next morning I had a
reply. Wow! Now technology is being driven by business across all areas
for money, money, money. Greed has taken over. Isolated pensioners and
the poor across the world are being excluded from knowledge, personal
growth and education, due to costs, the need for constant upgrading of
hardware and software and the greed of the 1% through money
manipulation, laundering and crooked tax loopholes. Technology keeps
increasing inequality. The disadvantaged will never catch up.”

A
data scientist based in Europe wrote, “A friend has recently begun
trading bitcoin. The volatility of the ecosystem, the potential for
massive gains and the stories of others benefiting incredibly from their
investments led to near-obsessive behaviour. He would phase out of
meetings, meals and social events to check the current bitcoin value –
it became more important than anything else.”

An executive
director of a Europe-based nonprofit wrote, “We don’t understand what we
can trust anymore. Just this week, a member of the family wrote over
iMessage to ask me to share a password over a ‘secure’ medium ‘like
email’; and another asked for a more secure way to do banking than over
Wi-Fi. I’m not mocking either; I’m pointing out that people I know who
don’t necessarily get what I do for a living don’t quite understand
what’s going on but have concerns that will lead to both withdrawal and
poor decisions that will negatively affect them.”

The
expert predictions reported here about the impact of the internet over
the next 10 years came in response to questions asked by Pew Research
Center and Elon University’s Imagining the Internet Center in an online
canvassing conducted between Dec. 11, 2017, and Jan. 15, 2018. This is
the ninth Future of the Internet
study the two organizations have conducted together. For this project,
we invited nearly 10,000 experts and members of the interested public to
share their opinions on the likely future of the internet, and 1,150
responded to at least one of the questions we asked. Their answers to
our main question about the future impact on digital life on people’s
well-being were reported here.

This report covers their responses another prompting query on the survey:

Please
share a brief personal anecdote about how digital life has changed your
daily life, your family’s life or your friends’ lives in regard to
well-being – some brief observation about life for self, family or
friends. Tell us how this observation or anecdote captures how
hyperconnected life changes people’s well-being compared to the way life
was before digital connectivity existed.

There was no “survey
question” directly preceding this prompt, so this report contains no
statistical analysis of their responses.

The
web-based instrument was first sent directly to a list of targeted
experts identified and accumulated by Pew Research Center and Elon
University during previous “Future of the Internet” studies, as well as those identified in an earlier study of people who made predictions about the likely future of the internet between 1990 to 1995.
Additional experts with proven interest in this particular research
topic were also added to the list. Among those invited were people who
are active in global internet governance and internet research
activities, such as the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), Internet
Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), Internet Society
(ISOC), International Telecommunications Union (ITU), Association of
Internet Researchers (AoIR), and the Organization for Economic
Cooperation and Development (OECD). We also invited a large number of
professionals and policy people from technology businesses; government,
including the National Science Foundation, Federal Communications
Commission and European Union; think tanks and interest networks (for
instance, those that include professionals and academics in
anthropology, sociology, psychology, law, political science and
communications); globally located people working with communications
technologies in government positions; technologists and innovators; top
universities’ engineering/computer science and business/entrepreneurship
faculty, graduate students and postgraduate researchers; plus many who
are active in civil society organizations such as Association for
Progressive Communications (APC), Electronic Privacy Information Center
(EPIC), Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and Access Now; and those
affiliated with newly emerging nonprofits and other research units
examining the impacts of digital life. Invitees were encouraged to share
the survey link with others they believed would have an interest in
participating, thus there may have been somewhat of a “snowball” effect
as some invitees invited others to weigh in.

Since the data are
based on a nonrandom sample, the results are not projectable to any
population other than the individuals expressing their points of view in
this sample.

The respondents’ remarks reflect their personal
positions and are not the positions of their employers; the descriptions
of their leadership roles help identify their background and the locus
of their expertise.

About 79% of respondents identified
themselves as being based in North America; the others hail from all
corners of the world. When asked about their “primary area of internet
interest,” 27% identified themselves as professor/teacher; 15% as
research scientists; 9% as futurists or consultants; 8% as advocates or
activist users; 7% as technology developers or administrators; 7% as
entrepreneurs or business leaders; 7% as authors, editors or
journalists; 4% as pioneers or originators; 2% as legislators,
politicians or lawyers; and an additional 15% specified their primary
area of interest as “other.”

About half of the expert
respondents elected to remain anonymous. Because people’s level of
expertise is an important element of their participation in the
conversation, anonymous respondents were given the opportunity to share a
description of their internet expertise or background, and this was
noted where relevant in this report.